English Paper
...ng reveals to the reader the insanity of the narrator. The narrator, the next morning, admitted to his guilt being a “feeble and equivocal feeling” which leads the reader to believe he has no conscience (65). But he then goes on to talk of how he “drowned in wine all memory of the deed,” which goes to show the reader that the alcohol plays a serious part in his actions and his loss of all sanity (65). The narrator soon admitted to being engrossed in the “spirit of PERVERSENESS,” an act of turning away what is good or right (65). He described it as “one of the primitive impulses of the human heart … which give direction to the character of Man” (65). No man feels the need to perform “a vile or a silly action” just because “he knows he should not” (66). It is not human nature to want to commit a “vile” or morally despicable act such as murdering your own cat or wife just because it’s against the rules. No man wants “to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such” (66). People break the laws by making mistakes, which is still not justifiable, but those who break the law and know they are breaking the law are insane, inhumane people. The narrator’s “unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself” seems like quite a perverse and absurd desire (66). These feelings of doing “wrong for the wrong’s sake only” led him to hang the “unoffending brute” for no reason (66, emphasis added). The word “unoffending” suggests the cat’s innocence of any wrong doing towards the narrator. He hung the cat because “it had loved [him]” and “given [him] no reason of offense,” which one would think would be a good reason not to kill Pluto but because of his amoral, insane attitude, he did (66). He was “committing [this] sin” in hopes that he would not even be able to be saved by “the infinite mercy of the Most Merciful and Most Terrible God” (66). The narrator seemed to believe that he was acting perversely, in the same manner every other human was, but actually no one kills their wife or cat just for the sake of putting trouble in their life. The narrator tried to justify his atrocious acts by saying that every human feels and acts in they same way he does, but he was wrong. As a reader from this passage, I learned about the unreliability of the narrator, through his insane beliefs and actions. I believe he had no sense or grasp of reality, therefore was probably unable to tell the difference between what was real and what might have been a hallucination. Also, his alcoholism was a huge reason for his transfo...