发布时间 : 星期五 文章简析《黑猫》的写作风格及人物角色更新完毕开始阅读
黑龙江外国语学院2011届毕业论文
Analysis of Writing Skills and Characters in The Black Cat
Chapter 1 Introduction
The Black Cat is a famous work in literary history of America. The book tells us a fantastic story, it is presented as a first—person narrative using an unreliable narrator. The protagonist in the story is a man. He tells the readers about a story between him and his two cats.
1.1 Introduction to the book
When the man was a child, he loved animals very much, his family always had many animals in his house, so he used to spend most of his days playing with the animals and taking care of them. As the years passed, he grew into a quiet, gentle man, and his love for animals grew too. He found that they were more friendly and more honest than most men. Animals were always his best friends.
He got married when he was quite young. Luckily, his wife also loved animals, and she used to buy him many animals as presents. In fact, their house was full of animals, just like a zoo, because they had various animals as bird, fish, dog, chicken, rabbit, monkey and cat.
One of his favorite animal was a cat which named Pluto. This cat was large, black and beautiful. The cat was also sagacious. This made the possessor love it very much and not let his wife take care of it. The man gave it his food and the cat followed him everywhere.
Several years later, life changed a little, this man became a heavy drinker, the need of alcohol grew stronger, he transformed into a man who was irritable and moody. He began to hit and shout at his wife. He also stopped taking care of his animals, except Pluto. But that did not continue too long, soon Pluto was also under his abuse.
It happened at one night, the man arrived home late. He was very drunk. When he saw Pluto tried to run away from him, his anger grew to the highest point. He then
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黑龙江外国语学院2011届毕业论文
caught it by its neck and shook it. With its huge fright, Pluto bit the man back. At that time, the man felt nothing but terrible anger and hostility, he took out a knife, and then carefully cut out one eye from Pluto's socket.
Although he felt shameful of what he had done to Pluto for a second, he remained untouched. At first he felt sad when he saw Pluto run away from him when it saw him, then he just felt a little angry of that scene. However, the next evil thing came. One morning the man woke up, found a rope and tied it round Pluto's neck, then hung the poor cat from a tree and let it die.
At that same night, the man had a fire in his house, fortunately, the couple survived the fire with everything in the house destroyed but one of his bedroom walls, where the head of his bed rested. Then he saw a shape of a cat outlined in his left white bedroom wall, he could also see a rope around the animal's neck. In great horror, he persuaded himself that his neighbors had noticed the fire, then one of them probably cut the cat from the tree and thrown it through his open window to wake him up, and then the cat's body had hit his bedroom wall and left its shape there, because the plaster on that wall was new and still soft.
The explanation seemed reasonable but the cat's shape really frightened him. He started to regret that he had killed the cat. Until another cat gave him a chance to smooth over his fault. He saw a cat in his favorite bar, the cat looked just like Pluto. Then he offered some money to the barman to buy the cat, but the barman said that the cat did not belong to him. So no one could tell where it had come from. He took the cat home, his wife liked it immediately. But gradually the cat made the man angry, he started to hate it. He did not hurt him any way, but he always tried to keep as far away from it as possible. He found the cat had lost one of its eyes like Pluto. But his kind gentle wife loved the cat more for this. It was strange that the cat only loved the man. The cat also had a mark on its chest and the mark slowly grew and changed until it had the clear shape of a terrible, horrible wooden posts from which they hang men by a rope around the neck!
As time gone by, the man feared more and more, horror then changed him into a monster. One day he murdered his wife in the cellar, because she tried to advise him
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黑龙江外国语学院2011届毕业论文
against hurting the cat. He hid the body behind the walls of the cellar where had bricks in the front and back but was empty in the middle. He quickly took out of some bricks from the front wall and put the body against the back wall, after that, he put back the bricks and covered them with plaster, and let them look just like all the other walls. When he finished this huge project, he looked around for the cat to kill it because it brought him too much unhappiness. But he could not find it anywhere. He then went to bed. Later the cat still did not appear, he felt so unprecedented free. Police and neighbors came to his home with nothing found here. When the second times the police visited again, the man rejoiced at his good fortune, and said that he was pleased that they had found nothing here. But he wanted to show the policemen something. So he pointed to the walls and asked them,\walls, you will notice, are very strong.\with a stick—the wall where he had hidden his wife. At that moment, the people here heard a strange sound coming from that wall, it listened liked a baby crying, then the sound grew into wail. The policemen ran to the wall and pulled out the bricks, then the wall was down immediately, all they saw, was the body of the man' wife and that lost cat on her head.
1.2 Introduction to the author
Edgar Allan Poe was born on January 19, 1809, and died on October 7, 1849. He was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, he was considered part of the American Romantic Movement. He was best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre. Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre. He is further credited with contributing to the emerging genre of science fiction. He was the first well-known American writer to try to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career.
Poe was born in Boston, Massachusettes. When he was a little boy, he became an orphan. Then Poe was informally taken by John and Frances Allan, of Richmond, Virginia. Poe parted ways with them in his adolescence. Because lacked money, he
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黑龙江外国语学院2011届毕业论文
attended university only for one semester. After it, he enlisted in the Army, but failed as an officer's cadet. Poe's literature life began with writing some poems anonymously, crediting only to \
Poe later switched his focus to prose and literary journals and periodicals, becoming known for his own style of literary criticism. He married to his 13-year-old cousin Virginia Clemm in Baltimore in 1835. He published his poem \1845 with instant success. Two years later, his wife died of tuberculosis. He then began planning to produce his own journal, but he died before this periodical came out. The cause of his death is unknown and has been attributed to alcohol, brain congestion, cholera, drugs, heart disease, rabies, suicide, tuberculosis, and other agents. Poe and his works influenced literature and other fields in America and all around the world. People who were influenced by him included Conan Doyle, Robert Louis, Adams Stevenson, Alfred Hitchcock, Tim Burton and other artists.
After Poe married to his 13-year-old cousin－Virginia while he was 27 years old. They became by all accounts a happy and devoted couple. Poe's one-time employer George Rex Graham wrote of their relationship: \wife was a sort of rapturous worship of the spirit of beauty.\Poe once wrote to a friend, \see no one among the living as beautiful as my little wife.\accounts, nearly idolized her husband. She often sat close to him while he wrote, kept his pens in order, and folded and addressed his manuscripts. However, beautiful Virginia died after five years of illness.
Virginia's death had a significant effect on Poe. After her death, Poe was deeply saddened for several months. A friend said of him, \to him. He did not seem to care after she was gone, whether he lived an hour, a day, a week or a year, she was his all. A year after her death, he wrote to a friend that he had experienced the greatest evil a man can suffer, he said, \wife, whom I loved as no man ever loved before\While Virginia was still struggling to recover, Poe turned to alcohol after abstaining for quite some time. Poe referred to his emotional response to his wife's sickness as his own illness, and that he found the cure to it \death of my wife. This I can and endure as becomes a man—it was the horrible
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