His favorite, a pet black cat, bites him one night and the narrator punishes it by cutting its eye out and then hanging it from a tree.

[2] In both, a murderer carefully conceals his crime and believes himself unassailable, but eventually breaks down and reveals himself, impelled by a nagging reminder of his guilt.

"The Black Cat", which also features questions of sanity versus insanity, is Poe's strongest warning against the dangers of alcoholism.

[3] He describes his lifelong love of animals and the many pets that he and his wife have taken in, including a large black cat named Pluto.

The narrator is initially disturbed by this phenomenon but soon constructs a plausible explanation, thinking that someone may have cut the cat's corpse down from the tree and thrown it into the bedroom to wake him during the fire, where it struck a patch of fresh plaster.

Over time, the narrator begins to fear and loathe the cat, as it reminds him of his cruelty toward Pluto, and sees to his horror that the white patch is slowly taking the shape of a gallows.

[5] Readers immediately responded favorably to the story, spawning parodies including Thomas Dunn English's "The Ghost of the Grey Tadpole".

[9] The use of the black cat evokes various superstitions, including the idea voiced by the narrator's wife that they are all witches in disguise.

The alcohol pushes the narrator into fits of intemperance and violence, to the point at which everything angers him – Pluto in particular, who is always by his side, becomes the malevolent witch who haunts him even while avoiding his presence.

When the narrator cuts Pluto's eye from its socket, this can be seen as symbolic of self-inflicted partial blindness to his own vision of moral goodness.

[8] From a rhetorician's standpoint, an effective scheme of omission that Poe employs is diazeugma, or using many verbs for one subject; it omits pronouns.