Sajeevan Rangeswaran

Midterm Essay, English 2001

October 26, 2020

                                                            Black Cat Narrator vs Emily

            Gothic is writing that creates excessive emotions and actions related to nightmares, mysteries, terror, death, and madness. We have read so many Gothic fictions this semester and most of them have a different gothic element in the story. There were two stories in which I felt the character has some similarities. The two stories were “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe and “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner. What are some of the similarities and differences between the narrator from “The Black Cat” and Emily from “A Rose for Emily” in their gothic fiction? 

           In the story “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe; the narrator is the main character, and he is an alcoholic who gets angry at everyone and beats his wife. One day he hanged his cat Pluto and after that, his house was destroyed by the fire. After that, he found a cat that looks like his cat Pluto. That cat followed the narrator even though the narrator did not like it. One day he could not tolerate the cat, so he decided to kill the cat with the knife, but his wife came in the middle, and instead of the cat he kills his own wife. Then he hides her body inside the wall where the cat will also get stuck. When the police came to his house, he got caught because the cat made noise from the wall. In the end, he was arrested for killing his wife and he is going to die now because of that. Spirit of perverseness has been discussed in “The Black Cat” when the narrator talked about how it’s human nature to commit a mistake and it happens to everyone. According to the Black Cat “Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or silly action for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgment, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such?” Here the narrator talks about how people know they should not break the law, but they decide to ignore it because of their nature.     

           In the story “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner, Emily is the main character who lives with her father in the southern united states. One day her father dies, and she lives alone in the house. One time she meets Homer Barron, who she falls in love with. Homer Barron told everyone in the area that he slept with Emily, which made Emily so angry. Emily decided to kill Homer Barron because of that. Even though she killed him; she kept Homer Barron dead body with her in the house. After a few years, she dies also because of aging. “A Rose for Emily” is told from a lot of different perspectives. It has been told from the first, second- and third-person points of view. An example from “A Rose for Emily” is “I want some poison,” she said to the druggist. She was over thirty then, still a slight woman, though thinner than usual, with cold, haughty black eyes in a face the flesh of which was strained across the temples and about the eye sockets as you imagine a lighthouse-keeper’s face ought to look.” Here they told from the first person and third-person point of view.  

           There have been a lot of differences between the Black Cat narrator and Emily from “A Rose for Emily”, but they have some similarities also. Uncanny is when gothic fiction shows some things that are close to reality. Both “The black cat” and “A Rose for Emily” showed some incidence that can happen in real life. For instance, the Black cat narrator kills the person he loves his wife and Emily kills the person who she loves Homer Barron. Even though Black Cat narrator didn’t mean to kill his wife, but in the end he killed her. Also, how they both kept their loved ones dead body with them in their house. Black Cat narrator buried his wife in the wall and Emily kept Homer Barron dead body in her bed. An example from “The Black Cat” is “And in this calculation I was not deceived. By means of a crowbar I easily dislodged the bricks, and, having carefully deposited the body against the inner wall, I propped it in that position, while with little trouble, I re-laid the whole structure as it originally stood.” Here the narrator talks about how he used the crowbar to open the wall and put the body inside the wall. An example from “A Rose for Emily” is “What was left of him, rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt, had become inextricable from the bed in which he lay; and upon him and upon the pillow beside him lay that even coating of the patient and biding dust.” Here Emily neighbors find Homer Barron dead body after Emily dies and they talked about what happened to his dead body.                

To sum it up I never thought there will be similarities between two characters from two different gothic fiction, but now I have written an essay about it. There are a lot of stories that will have some similarities between the two different stories. Even though Emily and the Black cat had some similarities, but differences outweigh the similarities.