When I finished writing this article, I died.

 

I would not describe my holiday assignment as a murder, mostly because that would be understating how much sufferings I had. 

 

My friend, if you were mercy enough to have my revenge, do remember that the brutal villain was nobody else but my boss, Edward.

 

If I had never felt weary of reading English before, I felt weary then.  Among the given options of the eight English novels, I choose the shortest one called The Black Cat, which covers upon thousands of words in length .  A big deal still seems it not?  Well,well, if the length of story was just a blunt bar as I played down; then the massive amount of advanced and elusive new words which summed to hundreds made the sharp edge of the lethal sword, penetrating my body and leaving me one last breath.

 

Then a reflection on it.

 

Just what I needed!

 

---

 

 

What are we readers expecting in a story?

 

The unexpected.  If an ordinary succession of events builds up a skeleton of a narration, the coincidences and accidents are nourishing the story with flesh and blood.  Though narrating a series of very natural causes and effects, The Black Cat penned by Edgar Allan Poe fantastically gets its wings with the logical but unpredictable advance of the tale.

 

In the very beginning of the story, the narrator has made it clear that the events are mere household and “...some intellect more calm, more logical, and far less excitable than my own,” will perceive them as nature.  However, he has also set the horror atmosphere that he neither expect nor solicit us readers to believe him, because “Mad indeed would I be to expect it, in a case where my very senses reject their own evidence.”

 

As the narrator begins to flashback, we readers discover that the man's personality had undergone a drastic transformation which he attributes to the perverse side of his nature evoked by the alcohol.  It is easy for us to follow him when he became moody and irritable from docility and humanity.  But it is beyond our reach when on one night, how he should cut one of his partial cat’s eyes from the socket!  No matter how “…much intoxicated,” he was, the unforeseen atrocity hideously shocks every reader.  We might take it as an acceptable accident, though.

 

Ambiguous and obscure, superstitions are also involved in the story, though the narrator just gave an understatement and assumed it to be coincidences.  The idea that “my wife, who at heart was not a little tinctured with superstition, made frequent allusion to the ancient popular notion, which regarded all black cats as witches in disguise.” was just mentioned by him “the matter at all for no better reason than that it happens, just now, to be remembered.” The narrator went to great lengths to scientifically explain the apparition of the cat in the wall; however, the chains of events were so highly coincidental that an explanation relying on the supernatural may be easier to accept.

 

Once again, we readers wonder if it is a damnation or what when we learn that the second cat was also missing an eye, with the chest upon which the gallows-like pattern were appearing.  Superstitions or just coincidences?  We don’t know.  The narrator this time was very careful to avoid stating if it was the same eye of which Pluto was deprived or how it happened that the damnable patterns appear on the second cat.  For us, we know the least, and even the appearance of the second cat was unexpected.

 

Of all the coincidences and accidents, the discovery of the cat behind the cellar wall is the easiest to believe while the disclosure of the crime is not so.  On reading the line “I was answered by a voice from within the tomb! --by a cry,” I guess every reader now could have the expectation for the end of the story.