PSYCHOLOGICAL AND PEDAGOGICAL ASPECTS OF E. POE’S “HORROR” STORY “THE BLACK CAT”

Abstract

The article suggests the analysis of the specifics of the psychological means usage in Edgar Poe’s “horror” story “The Black Cat”. It was proved that it is inner monologue that dominates in the writer’s story as a means of expressing the character’s reflection. The author employs the retrospective means (memories, reflections) to describe the most dramatic and deeply psychological episodes of the story – the murder of the cat, and later the murder of the main character’s wife. Edgar Poe pays attention to the bifurcastion of the protagonist’s consciousness and his transformation into a cruel murderer under the influence of a “demon” in the image of the cat. Leading concepts that outline the existential paradigm of the story are fear, loneliness, death and anxiety. The key concept of the protagonist’s life is the “boundary situation” (the “chronotope of the threshold”), which is directly related to the murder of the cat and the wife. The psychological saturation of the stoty is related to the isolation of the certain existential categories: sorrow, fear, death, loneliness, anguish, etc., among which the existential of fear is dominant. Psychological means of disclosing the state of fear are the psychological self-reflections of the main character that contribute to the speculation about life and memories of the past. The deepening of the psychological and pedagogical basis of Edgar Poe’s “horror” story “The Black Cat” takes place in connection with the image of the process of the protagonist’s degradation, the penetration into his inner world, the elucidation of the existential dimensions of his being. The writer uses a very wide range of the psychological analysis’s tools, which is an indicator of not only the features of the author’s worldview, but also an important part of his writer's skills. And all these means of psychologizing mutually reinforce each other in their interrelation to convey all aspects of human life, its innermost depths.