A literary semiotic approach to Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Black Cat’

Abstract

The study primarily aims to analyze one of Edgar Allan Poe’s well-known horror stories, “The Black Cat,” within the framework of literary semiotics. It is believed in the study that literary semiotics as a method of analysis is comprehensive enough to reveal as many fine details of the story as possible. Besides, it will provide a better understanding of the generation of the story and Poe’s authorial characteristics. The analysis is composed of three steps, each of which will indicate the implementation of the semiotic method on three postulated meaning levels of a narrative. The first area of investigation is the discursive level. In this level, the actors and actorial thematic roles, space, and lastly, time have been analyzed as formative elements of the narrative. The narrative level analysis is the second phase of examination through which the formulation of narrated events has been made with the help of text segmentation. Lastly, the deep-level analysis comprises the actors' transitions in the storyline from beginning to end. The findings gathered from the three-step semiotic analysis can be suggested to reveal that transformations from the beginning to the end of the story regarding characters, space, and time have taken place from good to evil, life to death, or bright to dark, which further highlights the means used by Poe for achieving the creation of a sense of horror.