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The three themes presented in "The Black Cat" by Edgar Allan Poe are confinement, violence, and intoxication. I will explore these themes and explain how they all end up becoming the narrator's downfall. The three are heavily intermixed and are results of the others, but I hope to differentiate between the three and explain their presence in the text.

**Confinement**- The narrator begins the story from his jail cell, where he is locked away as punishment for his crime. He hopes to explain his reasonings behind murdering his wife and the road that led him to this heinous crime. He was married at a young age and lived in a house with his wife. They enjoyed the company of an assortment of pets and the narrator goes into great detail about how much he loved his pets. Soon, the marriage becomes tense as the narrator falls into bad habits. He begins to resent his wife and the amrriage, and begins spending much time away from the home and wife. He is trapped in the cell called domesticity. It is deeply metaphorical when after killing his beloved cat, Pluto, the house burns to the ground. They owned a comfortable home but it all turned into ash. Instead of being freed he buys a new house. This house really segways the marriage into a downward spiral. He begins to hate the house and his wife for trapping him and not being able to be a free man. The violence in the couple come to a head when the narrator tries to kill the second cat he finds and his wife tries to interfere. He kills her and celeverly confines her inside a wall. The story is full of allegory looks at the human being trapped both mentally and physically. The husband feels he cannot truely be himself and his wife is meddlesome and needy. The home traps him and makes him be near his wife.

**Violence**- By his own confession, the narrator is not a violent person at the begiining of the story. He loves animals and loves his wife. Later, the narrator soon becomes very violent and mistreats both animals and his wife. His violence first climaxes when he is deep into his alcoholism. He had a cat named Pluto that he was very enamored with. He thought the cat was very smart and seemed to be even a little proud of the feline. Soon though, in a drunken stupor, he cuts out the eyes of the cat and hangs it from a tree. This act is the beginning of the downfall. He does not just commit a mild act with this murder, but sadistically cuts out his eyes and revels in the pain and in the blood. Despite the violence he committed, he does not regret this but instead is somewhat pacified; until the cat comes back. It was probably a different cat and the character's own delusion, but the new cat does bare more than a small resemblence to his Pluto. The cat gets on his nerves more and more until he picks up and axe with the intent to kill it. He then ends up burying the axe in his wife's head. Instead of being appalled, he violently plunges the axe until her body and then cuts her up into tiny pieces. His own wife. He is not frightened or sad but instead plans on how to hide the body. Any sane and non-violent person would be mortified to see their lover's body in this state but he mentions no disgust in handling her bloody parts. Violence is not anything that the main character questions but instead uses it as a tool for his anger and rage.

**Alcohol**- I truely believe that while this man may seem insane, the main reason for all of his violence and feelings of confinement stem from the abuse of alcohol. He was an animal lover and loved his wife in the beginning of the story. The hatred and self-loathing all began after he started being an alcoholic. He also suffers delusion and hallucinates because of this vice. An example of this is after his first house burns down, he imagines that on a wall he sees an imprint of the cat. His guilt and alcohol fused together to project this image into his head. He also suffers from paranoia when he drinks and thinks his cat and wife are out to make him miserable. **While the alcohol did not create the madness, it certainly fueled it.**   **[|Story Available Here]**