The Setting

This time I’m going to analyze the setting of the story and comment on its peculiarities.

The first thing I want to mention is that the narrator is much more interested in telling his story without giving details about the time and place of action. In such a way, a reader can make some generalizations that this story could happen anywhere with family couples when one member is an alcoholic.

But still a reader gets to know that the narrator is kept in the jail and writes his last words before the death penalty. As it has been mentioned, he doesn’t give a description of his house though a reader comes across the repeated scenes concerning walls. The only wall remains after a fire in the house of the narrator with a figure of a gigantic cat on it. This event foreshadows the following one when another black cat is buried alive in the other house of the narrator. In the second case the story-teller builds a wall himself in order to hide his terrible crime. To my mind, it’s like a bitter irony in which the black cat acts like an avenger…

Sometimes we build walls in order to feel safety but they usually separate us from the reality and may turn us into escapists. The main character tries to escape, but the reality gives him punishment which he deserves…