The mood throughout a story plays a key role in the understanding of a short story and an author. A mood is the feeling the author sends to the reader about the story. In “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allen Poe, the main character or the narrator owns many pets because of his adoration for them. However, tragically all of his pets die, thus losing his most prized possessions. Additionally, Davidson comments strongly on Poe’s work, stating… ” ‘The Black Cat’ is a story, exceedingly well told, illustrative of a theory, which the author has advanced in other writings, respecting perverseness,” is a strong opinion made about the book and Edgar Allen Poe’s forms of writing (Davidson 294). This shows that Edgar Allen Poe, like in many of his other stories, likes to relate to his theory of perverseness. Poe used perverseness in this story multiple times including when he states, “Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, then I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart,” (Poe 657). Perverseness helps create a mood in this story too because unreasonableness is what caused copious deaths in the story leading to a pessimistic mood. This short story is “The most wild, yet most homely narrative,” that often terminates dreadfully for the narrator (655). Because the narrator is always in trepidation, the atmosphere of the story is very gloomy. Additionally, it is a well-constructed story that talks about horror and a problem Poe had too, which was drinking (Baudelaire 314). In the short story, “The Black Cat,” Edgar Allan Poe creates a morose and ominous mood through the actions of the characters. 

To begin, in this ominous and morose short story, the narrator sadly ends up becoming insane and kills everything he loves. This is especially evident when the unnamed narrator kills his wife and devises a plan to place his wife in a plaster wall so he would not be caught for committing a transgression (Poe 663). Another beloved creature his cat who he described as, “Pluto—this was the cat’s name—was my favorite pet and play mate,”(656). The narrator ultimately takes a knife and cuts his “favorite pet’s” eye because he is drunk and was not thinking correctly (656). After the narrator is sober, he realizes the horrors of his actions.

               “When reason returned with the morning when I had slept off the fumes of the night’s debauch- I experienced a sentiment half of horror, half of remorse, for the crime of which I had been guilty, but it was, at best, a feeble and equivocal feeling, and the soul remained untouched,” (687).

Eventually, the narrator becomes sane and he finds another cat that resembles his dear Pluto. The new cat he finds interacts with the main character and the main character thus establishes a love for the animal. The narrator describes, “Upon my touching him he immediately arose, purred loudly, rubbed against my hand, and appeared delighted with my notice,” (660). Since the cat acts as his old cat did, lovingly and caringly, and since he resembles his old cat the narrator seems to find an immediate connection with him. However, “One night, returning home, much intoxicated, from one of haunts about town,” the narrator attempts to kill his cat but fails, which scares away his cat (657). The act of the narrator becoming drunk and hurting the creatures he loves defends Edgar Allen Poe’s belief that humans act on impulses (Davidson 295). Thus, “The Black Cat” contains a gloomy mood because the characters reveal their “morbid states of the mind” (295).

            Additionally, the mood is the feeling the author gives the reader in a story. In “The Black Cat,” the mood is a morbid, depressing one because of the tremendous amount of deaths, disasters, and misery of the narrator. The many deaths that occurred were of his favorite cat, his other loved pets, and his wife. The narrator, his wife, and the servant barely escape their house, as it rapidly burned down is disaster. (Poe 658). The narrator realized “My entire worldly wealth was swallowed up, and I resigned myself thenceforward to despair,” (658). This made the character extremely depressed, and as a result, he started to drink many alcoholic beverages to help him cope with the problems he is facing. The narrator admits his sadness when “this dread was not exactly a dread of physical evil—and yet I should be at a loss how otherwise I define it,” stating he is dreadful (661). It is not a single tragic event that causes his state but the compilation of all the events in his life which leads to his overwhelming and continuous depression. A bad event does not have to happen to him that day but he has had so many that he will feel depressed even when nothing went wrong. As one can see the reoccurring mood is despair, dread, and morose. “Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Black Cat” remains one of the most mystifying, sad, and, horrifying tales,” proving the mood (Baudelaire 314). “The Black Cat” is similar to many of Poe’s other short stories because of the similar moods. In “The Black Cat” like his other stories, a superstition is often used and “morbid events” happen to the narrator (Edinburgh 395).

Furthermore, the dreadful quagmires the main character gets into and many other actions of the characters help create the mood. The actions of the characters help create the mood because their actions affect the reader’s perception of the story. For example, “I took from my waistcoat pocket a pen-knife, opened it, grasped the poor beast by the throat, and deliberately cut one of its eyes from the socket!” (Poe 657). This causes the reader to feel horrified and sympathetic for the cat. Another instance is when, “… I aimed a blow at the animal which, of course, would have proved instantly fatal had it descended as I wished,” (660). This is when the main character becomes drunk again and attempts to kill his new cat by chopping its head off. However, instead of killing the cat his wife came in the way and saved it. This would normally go against the mood of the story because it is a happy conclusion, but later the main character gets mad at his wife and kills her. Thus, this successful ending actually changed and the repetitive mood comes continues. As one evaluates the overall actions of the narrator, one notices the narrator’s attitude is altered by alcohol abuse and this causes drastic changes to his life. Overall, those changes slowly cause his deterioration (Edinburgh 396). The alcohol abuse led him to the death of many, and because he lost, so much he lost focus. This leads to his house burning down and the loss of all his possessions, adding on to the loss of his wife, and all of his pets. The feeling the reader gets when recollecting all the actions of the characters is a morose and is a slightly horrified one.

            In conclusion, the actions of the characters create an ominous and morose mood in the short story “The Black Cat.” The mood is easy to recognize in this short story because of the many instances there is a morose or ominous part. To conclude the story of “The Black Cat,” Poe attempts to horrify the reader by placing events into the story for shock value. Poe succeeds at this when he writes, “I approached and saw, as if graven in bas-relief upon the white surface, the figure of a gigantic cat,” (Poe 659). This shocks the reader because the cat was brutally killed by the narrator yet once the house burns down, one-wall remains with an image of a gigantic cat, which resembles Pluto. This is meant to shock and horrify the reader as though something supernatural is occurring while foreshadowing that another cat is coming. This caused the narrator to become partially insane because “For months I could not rid myself of the phantasm of the cat,” (Poe 659). This insanity helps create the mood of horror because of the horrifying things the narrator does because he is insane. The “Black Cat” is “fantastic” in the way it creates a “boundary” between the real and fake and the horrifying and depressing (Baudelaire 314). This boundary between two different aspects allows the story to be both bloodcurdling and morose even though they are unrelated. Edgar Allen Poe helps the reader be aware of the mood of this story by placing constant hints. By understanding the mood of the story, one will be able to comprehend the story and its events at a deeper level.