Settings Influence on Tone and Mood As a person reads “The Black Cat,” he/she begins to notice that the tone is very ominous and dark. To add to that, the main character’s cellar is also a mysterious place that lurks with disaster. The reader might also feel uncomfortable as the police are searching the man’s cellar but find nothing over the course of a few days. However, the reader knows where the body is buried. The police, nevertheless, are one step ahead and do suspect that something is fishy, but they have no way to prove it. All in all, the cellar is making the police more suspicious because of its creepy character.
Character Analysis- Actions and Motives A person might find it strange for someone to kill his wife because of a cat, but that is quite true in “The Black Cat.” The main character’s motives to kill his wife were: alcohol, the black cat, and perverseness. The reader knows that the main character has a drinking problem, but because of that drinking problem, he had no idea what he was doing. It is a possibility that at the time, the main character didn’t know that he was killing his wife, but we will never know. The second motive is the black cat. He states that the cat would often pressure him to do something crazy because it resembled …show more content…
In “The Black Cat,” Edgar Allen Poe uses flashback and foreshadowing to create suspense. The reader knows that “The Black Cat” is a flashback based off of the word tense. It starts off with the narrator saying that the reader won’t believe them and that he’ll die tomorrow. After that, he explains what happened. The narrator also foreshadowed something in the beginning by saying that we (the reader) wouldn’t believe his horrific deed. The foreshadowing continues along the story when he/she reads about the outline of the dead cat on the wall. The reader can foreshadow that the outline will raise suspicions as to what happened