The Black Cat Literary Project
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Who are we? What is the project about? Edgar Allan Poe The Black Cat
Who are we? We are Eduarda De Carli and Junie Nunes de Souza, undergrad students of the English Language and Literatures course of Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul. This semester, 2014/1, we are taking a subject named Ensino de LĂngua e Literatura Estrangeira e Tecnologia EAD, which is the reason why we created this project.
What is the project about? We had to choose a literary text and, after talking about it, make a script for an adaptation that later should be made into an animation or a book with text and images. Our choice was The Black Cat, written by the American writer Edgar Allan Poe, and the final product is this book.
Edgar Allan Poe “The name Poe brings to mind images of murderers and madmen, premature burials, and mysterious women who return from the dead. His works have been in print since 1827 and include such literary classics as “The TellTale Heart,” “The Raven,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.” This versatile writer’s oeuvre includes short stories, poetry, a novel, a textbook, a book of scientific theory, and hundreds of essays and book reviews. He is widely acknowledged as the inventor of the modern detective story and an innovator in the science fiction genre, but he made his living as America’s first great literary critic and theoretician. Poe’s reputation today rests primarily on his tales of terror as well as on his haunting lyric poetry.” Font: http://www.poemuseum.org/life.php
The Black Cat
written by Eduarda De Carli and Junie Nunes de Souza
*image edited by us
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Maybe it was something of the supernatural order, maybe not -- you, logical mind, will think that it was not. But first you have to know that...
‌I love pets!
My wife loves pets, too! How lucky I am! We have birds, a goldfish, a fine dog, rabbits, a small monkey, and a cat.
Well, it’s not simply a cat… IT’S A BLACK CAT! My silly wife sometimes says it is a witch in disguise! Can you believe it?
Well, Pluto, the black cat, is my favorite pet!
For years everything is alright. But things start to change. I’m not always in the mood to be nice to my animals - or to my wife… You know, sometimes there’s a mad man inside of me that makes me feel like I’m a different person - a worse person. Ok, alcohol helps with that sometimes; it changes me a little.
There is this one night when I get home after one of my nights out that is the catalyst. Pluto is avoiding me and I will not take no for an answer, and when I force him to come to me, he bites me! My beloved animal bites me!
It’s like a demon possesses me. Without thinking twice, I get a penknife and cut out one of his eyes! Now when I tell you this I feel ashamed.
Some time passes, the cat recovers but avoids me with all his might. More and more I feel my spirit become more perverse, and I finally do it. I go to the patio and hang him by his neck on a tree.
I wake up that night with a fire. My wife and I barely manage to escape, and we see the house crumbling. The weirdest of all is that there is only one wall that remains intact -- a wall with a figure of a huge cat.
But whatever. We move. One night I’m out again and I see a black cat similar to Pluto. Oh, the feelings‌ I pet the cat and he accepts, and follows me home.
My wife and the cat create a bond. He and I did not. Well, the more he approached me the more I rejected him, I can’t stand this! I avoid him so I don’t hurt him.
The cat… oh, this black cat. Did I tell you that he doesn’t have an eye? For some time I think he’s Pluto, but he has a white mark on his fur. At first the mark has no shape, but as time passes by, it seems that it takes the shape of GALLOWS!
So this one day we are all in the cellar and I decide to give an end to the animal. I try to hit him with an axe, but my wife defends him. Filled with uncontrollable rage, I strike her in the head. I hide her in the walls of the cellar, which are strangely made for this kind of thing -- hiding a body, I mean.
After everything is ready, I cannot find the damned cat. Some days pass and some policemen come to the house. I show them around, satisfied that they are never going to find anything. I am calm. When they are ready to leave, however, I decide to show them the cellar. I don’t know what came over me. I start bragging and hit the wall with a cane, and suddenly a voice from hell can be heard from inside it!
They hit the wall and everything falls apart -- in both senses. My wife’s corpse is there‌ with the cat perched upon her head!
I asked for this last conversation because I need to understand‌ What really happened?
THE END?