Aspects of the Narrator in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat” Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat” is a perverse grotesque short story. What makes this tale so horrific is how Poe has created an unreliable, and nameless, narrator to tell this story. Telling this story from the first person point of view intensifies the shock and horror, which stops short of “the wavering line of disgust” (Womack 1). The narrator’s unreliability is born from three major influences. His biggest influence is mostly due to his battles with “…the [f]iend [i]ntemperance” (Poe 894). This relationship with alcohol allows his behavior to weave from docile to demonic, in smooth su