Summary More than any of Poe's stories, "The Black Cat" illustrates best the capacity of the human mind to observe its own deterioration and the ability of the mind to comment upon its own destruction without being able to objectively halt that deterioration.

The Black Cat, short story by Edgar Allan Poe, first published in The Saturday Evening Post in August 1843 and included in Poe’s 1845 collection Tales. The narrator of “The Black Cat” is an animal lover who, as he descends into alcoholism and perverse violence, begins mistreating his wife and his black cat Pluto.

In Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat,” an unreliable first-person narrator relates how alcohol and self-deception led him to kill his pets and murder his wife. In a drunken rage, the narrator hangs his beloved black cat, Pluto.