The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe
Quick answer: The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe, summarised with the ending: Pluto, the second cat, the walled-up wife, and the themes of guilt, drink and perverseness.
A man who is to hang tomorrow sits down to explain, calmly and reasonably, how he gouged out his cat's eye, murdered his wife with an axe, and was betrayed by a scream from inside a wall. Poe published The Black Cat in 1843, and it remains his most disturbing study of self-destruction, partly because the narrator keeps insisting that nothing supernatural happened at all.
This page gives the complete plot with the ending, the small cast, the themes, from the spirit of perverseness to drink, and the narrative craft: a confession that offers rational explanations for every horror and then quietly declines to believe them.
What happens, ending included
The narrator, once famous for gentleness and a love of animals, marries a like-minded wife and fills the house with pets, chief among them a large, intelligent black cat named Pluto. Drink changes him. Growing moody and violent, he comes home intoxicated one night, fancies the cat is avoiding him, seizes it, and when it bites his hand in fright, cuts one of its eyes from its socket with a penknife. The cat recovers and shuns him, and its fear breeds in the narrator what he calls the spirit of perverseness, the longing to do wrong for wrong's sake: one morning, weeping even as he does it, he hangs Pluto from a tree. That night his house burns down. On the one surviving wall, spectators find the image, in relief, of a gigantic cat with a rope about its neck. The narrator manufactures a rational explanation and half believes it.
Poverty follows. In a tavern he finds a second black cat, one-eyed like Pluto, identical except for a splotch of white on its breast, and it follows him home, where his wife adores it and he comes to loathe and dread it, especially as the white mark slowly takes, to his eye, the shape of a gallows. One day, on an errand into the cellar of the wretched old building they now inhabit, the cat nearly trips him on the stairs; he swings an axe at it, his wife catches his arm, and in a rage he buries the axe in her brain. He walls the corpse into a recess of the cellar behind new brickwork, and the cat disappears; for three nights the murderer sleeps soundly. On the fourth day the police search the house, find nothing, and are on their way out when the narrator, in sheer bravado, raps his cane on the very spot where his wife stands entombed. From within the wall comes an answering cry, half sob, half scream. The police tear down the bricks and find the corpse upright, the missing cat sitting on its head. He had walled the animal in with his victim, and its voice has delivered him, as he puts it, to the hangman.
The cast, human and animal
Poe keeps everyone nameless except the first cat, which is its own signal: Pluto, the god of the underworld.
Themes: perverseness, drink, guilt
The narrator himself names the central theme: perverseness, which he calls one of the primitive impulses of the human heart, the urge to do a thing precisely because it is forbidden. Poe returns to this idea across several tales, but here it gets its purest demonstration: the cat is hanged, the narrator says, because it had loved him and had given him no reason. Alcohol is the second theme, handled with unusual directness for 1843; the narrator's decline maps exactly onto his drinking, and modern readers often treat the story as an addiction narrative wearing gothic clothes.
The third theme is guilt's need for an audience. Every catastrophe is triggered by the narrator's own display: the fire follows the hanging, the image on the wall follows the fire, and the final scream is summoned by his own cane rapping on the brickwork, an act of pure showing off at the door of his own crime. The sharper reading is that nothing supernatural is required anywhere: chance, opium-free but drink-soaked perception, and self-betraying compulsion explain everything, and the narrator supplies those explanations himself before shuddering away from them. The horror is watching a mind choose its haunting.
The craft: rational explanations, offered and refused
The story's signature move is a double gesture: every uncanny event comes with a sober explanation, the corpse thrown through the window to wake him could account for the image, the gallows-shaped splotch grows only gradually and only to his eye, and the narrator presents each explanation and then lets his dread override it. Poe thus writes two stories at once, a ghost story and a case study, sharing every sentence. Writers can lift the device whole: supply the rational account yourself, and make your narrator the one who cannot accept it.
The frame is the other lesson. The opening paragraph, a condemned man promising a plain household narrative and asking some calmer intellect to explain it, sets a contract of unreliability that pays off in the cane-rapping scene, where the promised plainness cracks open. First-person control this tight scores highly on Language and Voice in Writory's five-part rubric; anyone drafting for the September Short Story Contest could study how Poe times each denial one beat after each horror.
The scream in the wall, read closely
The ending compresses the whole story into one sound. The cat's cry is, literally, an animal walled up by accident; morally, it is the narrator's guilt given a voice at the exact moment he performs innocence. Poe makes the narrator cause the discovery himself, no detective outwits him, no clue betrays him, and that choice turns a crime story into a psychological law: what is buried will insist on being found, and the burier will do the finding. The upright corpse with the cat on its head is grotesque, but the rap of the cane is the true climax, and any essay should say so.
What poets can take from this
- Define perverseness in the narrator's own terms, doing wrong for wrong's sake, and use the hanging of Pluto as its proof case.
- Track the drink: every escalation follows intoxication, and the story reads coherently as an addiction narrative.
- For the supernatural question, cite the double explanations; the story is engineered so both readings survive.
- As a writer, let your narrator rationalise each horror and then act as if the rationalisation failed; the gap is the character.
- Make guilt active, not moody: Poe's narrator knocks on the wall himself, and your buried secrets should be self-betraying too.
- Keep the victim's murder brutally brief; one sentence of violence after pages of dread outhits a page of gore.
Try it yourself
Write a first-person confession by someone who insists, in a calm and reasonable voice, that there is a natural explanation for everything that happened. Give the reader all the pieces of that natural explanation, and let the narrator be the only person who cannot believe it. End at the moment their own bravado exposes them.
Questions
Is the second cat in The Black Cat supernatural?
Poe leaves it perfectly balanced. The cat may be Pluto returned, one eye missing and a gallows mark growing on its breast, or an ordinary one-eyed stray onto which a guilty drunkard projects his terror. Every uncanny detail has a rational account the narrator himself supplies, then rejects.
Why does the narrator kill his wife?
She catches his arm as he swings an axe at the cat on the cellar stairs, and in what he calls a rage more than demoniacal he kills her instead. The murder is displacement: the fury belongs to his self-loathing and his dread of the animal, and she is simply the person who intervenes.
How is the narrator caught at the end?
By himself. When police search the cellar a fourth time, he raps his cane on the very wall hiding the corpse, boasting about the house's construction. A muffled cry answers: he had accidentally walled the cat in with the body. The police tear down the bricks and find both.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the August contest and have your own poem read and scored.