Why did Poe write "The Black Cat"?

Since we
aren't mind readers, it's not possible to give a definitive answer to this question. So far as I
know, Poe did not leave any commentary in letters, journals, or other writings as to the
specific impulse behind the creation of "." In general, however, we know that he was
concerned with portraying unusual states of mind as well as issues of mental illness and that it
was typically his intention to produce a single effect in his stories that would grab the
reader's attention (and hold it) through an overwhelming surge of shock and emotion. This
prescription for literature is fulfilled by "The Black Cat." It's hard to believe that
any reader could forget this tale even if they disliked it or were repelled by it.

Poe depicts a character, the narrator of the story, who has committed a series of
brutal, sadistic actsor has possibly imagined that he has done so. The narrator, if he gives any
explanation at all for his behavior, cites "intemperance," the nineteenth-century term
that encompasses alcoholism and substance-abuse in general.

Though there is
debate as to whether Poe ever used drugs (as many of his contemporaries did use chiefly
laudanum, an opiate) he was a heavy drinker throughout most of his adult life. In his time,
alcoholism was not generally considered in clinical terms as an illness, as we see it today, but
as a moral failing. Yet Poe instinctively graspedand so expressed it in "The Black
Cat"that substance abuse is a disease with destructive
consequences.

His knowledge of this from personal experience is something he
extrapolates into the bizarre, terrifying scenario in which a man commitsin reality or in
hallucinationsmutilation and murder. Poe's motive for writing such a story may have indeed been
that of making a statement about a condition he recognized as a disease, long before it was seen
as such in the public consciousness and even by much of the medical establishment of the
time.