The Black Cat is a short story written by the poet Edgar Allan Poe. In this presentation, the writer analyzed the plot of the short story using Booker's Seven Basic Plots.

1. Ummanabiegh Ismail Jalla

2. This essay is to analyze “The Black Cat”
by Edgar Allan Poe. The aim of this writing is
to analyze the plot of the short story. The
writer uses the Booker’s Seven Basic Plots
theory and close-reading method. The short
story follows the meta-plot of the Booker’s
theory—Anticipation Stage, Dream Stage,
Frustration Stage, Nightmare Stage, and
Destruction Stage—and is a Tragedy.
Keywords: Plot, Booker’s Seven Basic Plots,
Stages, Tragedy

3. Edgar Allan Poe was born on January
19, 1809, in Boston, Massachusetts. In
1827, Poe published his first book,
"Tamerlane and Other Poems" (1827). In
1829, he became a West Point cadet, but
was dismissed after 6 months for
disobedience. By that time he published
"Al Aaraf" (1929) and "Poems by Edgar A.
Poe" (1831), with the funds contributed by
his fellow cadets.

4. The Seven Basic Plots is a theory by
Christopher Booker. The theory was first
published in his book “The Seven Basic Plot:
Why We Tell Stories” (2004). The theory
consists of seven meta-plots—Overcoming
the Monster, Rags to Riches, The Quest,
Voyage and Return, Comedy, Tragedy, and
Rebirth—all of which are following the same
five stages: Anticipation Stage, Dream Stage,
Frustration Stage, Nightmare Stage, and
Destruction Stage.

5. The Black Cat tells a story about a man
who used to love pets. He and his wife had
several pets, including a black cat called
Pluto. They were good friends until several
years later when the man became an
alcoholic and abusive towards their pets. One
night the cat accidentally bit the man and his
anger drove him to gouge the cat’s eye and
hang him from a tree to death. After that,
somehow, his house caught in fire.

6. Since then, Pluto’s death had been terrorizing him.
One day, an almost identical cat approached him and
wouldn’t leave his side. He hated the cat, for it
reminded him of Pluto. When the cat accidentally
almost tripped him down the stairs, he got angry and
tried to kill the cat with an axe. His wife tried to stop
him but because of his anger, he killed his wife instead.
He then plastered his wife’s dead body to the cellar to
hide it. When the police came to investigate, a growl
came out of the wall, the wall crumbled and the cat
jumped out. The police saw the man’s wife’s dead
body and gave him a death penalty for it.

8. In this stage, the hero feels like something is
missing from his life. To fulfill this sense of
emptiness, he looks for some unconventional way
to satisfy himself. In the short story, the narrator
was an alcoholic, which usually means that he is
unhappy and has a lot of problems in his life.
It is stated in the story that he started drinking
when he got his cat, Pluto, and the other pets.
Even though drinking is rather conventional, it
seems to be what the narrator anticipated in the
first stage of the story.

9. In this stage, the hero becomes very
committed to his course of action, and so
things will seem to be going well for him. In
the story, the narrator has been drinking for
several years. These years of drunkenness
seem to pass like a dream, as it is not
stated that within those years the narrator
had had any significant problems in his life.

10. In “The Black Cat”, Pluto was being
physically abused. This stage is where
things start to go wrong. After plucking
Pluto’s eyes and hanging him, the
narrator’s house catches on fire and he
and his family loses everything. Booker
says that in this stage, a shadow figure
might appear to threaten the hero. This
shadow figure would be the second cat of
the narrator.

11. According to Booker, in this stage, the life of
the hero gets out of control. In the short story, the
narrator kills his wife and hides her body in the wall
of the cellar. All of this may happen because the
narrator feels threatened by the clinginess of the
second cat whose physical characteristics are
almost identical to Pluto. In this stage of the story,
the narrator feels haunted by the second cat. He is
aware of his feelings that the second cat is
somehow a reincarnation of Pluto, and that scared
him, considering how badly he tortured Pluto. He
then proceeds to name the second cat “Night
Mare”.

12. In this stage of the story, the narrator is a
bit too satisfied with himself. He was very
confident that his job of walling his wife to the
cellar is flawless that he mistakenly walled his
cat too. When the police came, he tapped the
cellar wall with a cane and something inside
the wall growled. While it is true that his wife
was dead, his cat was not. The wall crumbled
and exposed his wife’s decomposing body to
the police, sending him straight to death
sentence.

13. By analyzing the plot of “The Black Cat”
by Edgar Allan Poe, the writer found that
the plot of the story can be analyzed using
Booker’s theory of Seven Basic Plots. The
short story has a Tragedy plot, and the
main character goes through five stages:
Anticipation Stage, Dream Stage,
Frustration Stage, Nightmare Stage, and
Destruction Stage.