Sunday, November 12, 2017

In the story “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe, what are examples of the sense taste?

Imagery, or vivid description of sensory information, that describes the way something tastes is called gustatory imagery; there is also visual (sight), tactile (touch), auditory (sound), and olfactory (smell). I can find no gustatory imagery in the story you cite. There are certainly numerous examples of visual and auditory imagery. One of the most arresting auditory images describes the cat's "scream" at the story's end. The narrator says,

No sooner had the reverberation of my blows sunk into silence, than I was answered by a voice from within the tomb!—by a cry, at first muffled and broken, like the sobbing of a child, and then quickly swelling into one long, loud, and continuous scream, utterly anomalous and inhuman—a howl—a wailing shriek, half of horror and half of triumph.

With such vivid description as this, it is not difficult for us to imagine the inhuman and horrifying yowls of the cat which had been buried alive with its dead mistress, hidden within the wall by its murderous master. The description of this second black cat is also rife with visual imagery. The narrator says,

It was a black cat—a very large one—fully as large as Pluto, and closely resembling him in every respect but one. Pluto had not a white hair upon any portion of his body; but this cat had a large, although indefinite splotch of white, covering nearly the whole region of the breast.

We can clearly see the cat in our mind's eye as a result of this detailed descriptive imagery. I can find examples of tactile imagery in the story as well, but no gustatory.

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