"The Black Cat," a claustrophobic tale of marital life gone
wrong, offers a distinct movement from freedom to confinement.
We meet the narrator already in his prison cell, writing, to
free himself from his bonds – the literal bonds of the cell, and
the bondage confining his mind and heart. How he became so
trapped is the subject of his writing and the reason why he has
taken the pen to the page. We learn how he traps his wife and
pets in a cycle of violence and abuse. As things go from bad to
worse, the physical spaces the characters inhabit shrink. While
the man's story begins in a house of wealth and comfort (or so
he implies) it ends in brick tomb in the cellar of a rundown
building. The narrator of "The Black Cat" feels trapped in his
marriage and kills his wife to get out of it; an examination of
his description of his sleep patterns support this point. The
story is an allegorical comment on how writers (like the
narrator writing from his prison cell) are trapped by their own
stories.