He sees it as a sign of menace, and of his guilt. In his old cat-lover days, he might have considered the cat's snuggling a sign of affection, but the cat has become an easy victim for his rage. As with all his other problems, the narrator blames this situation on the cat. His dream life and his waking life combine to form an almost seamless nightmare-scape. The narrator admits to nodding off frequently, and to sleep deprivation. In many Poe stories, we aren't completely sure whether the narrator is asleep, awake, or somewhere in between. According to a footnote in The Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, "The Night Mare myth was a dream horse that trampled people in their sleep, it's great weight causing a sense of suffocation" (353, Source ). The narrator describes the cat as a "Night Mare," though some texts, like the University of Virginia e-text used here, run the two words together to form nightmare, which is the usual contemporary spelling. So the narrator eventually stops sleeping. If the man falls asleep, he has bad dreams, and always wakes up with the cat sitting on his chest, breathing on his face. The cat won't leave him alone, day or night. Things start to get hairy for the narrator when the second cat comes along. However, we cover their symbolic and allegorical aspects in their "Character Analyses." The Night Mare These furry friends seem like symbols or allegories. If you are looking for information on one or the other of the black cats here in this section, we can understand why.
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