The Unity of Effect in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Black Cat: Narrative Structure and Symbolic Design

Abstract

This paper examines Edgar Allan Poe’s The Black Cat through the theoretical lens of the unity of effect, demonstrating how coherent emotional intensity is produced through the interplay of unreliable narration, symbolic recurrence, and rhythmic narrative design. Integrating close reading, narratological analysis, and symbolic criticism, the study argues that Poe transforms external horror into an internal psychological mechanism. The narrator’s defensive rhetoric and fractured syntax construct a confined mental space where reason and madness coexist, while recurring motifs—the black cat, the white patch, the noose, and the wall—form a cyclical structure of guilt, retribution, and punishment. The simultaneity of the cat’s cry and the wall’s collapse converts psychological tension into aesthetic revelation, fulfilling Poe’s principle of the unity of effect.

Beyond aesthetic coherence, the story also reveals the moral and gender tensions embedded in nineteenth-century domestic ideology. By redefining the unity of effect as both a narratological and symbolic mechanism, this paper contributes to the understanding of Gothic aesthetics and the structural logic of modern short fiction.