What is the main tone of Edgar Allan Poe's story "The Black Cat?"This is for a literary analysis of "The Black Cat" by Edgar Allen Poe; my theme is...

Your definition of tone is accurate. I think that the difficulty
with Edgar Allan Poe's "The Black Cat" is that his tone is
ironic.

The definition of irony is the difference between what we
expect to happen and what really happens. The narrator starts by eliciting our sympathy, along
with establishing himself as a reliable narrator.

The narrator tries
to convince the reader that the occurrence of every day incidents lead to his fate, even when he
stabs the cat (Pluto) in the eye. By the time he kills the cat, the reader
is beginning to seriously suspect that what the narrator is saying is not
entirely accurate.

The narrator soon becomes an
unreliable voice; we discover he is in jail waiting to be executed, but it
is not until later that we realize he has committed murder—something we may not be totally
prepared for. This is another "swoop" the plot takes as the narrator weaves his tale, even as he
reports the image of the cat hanging from a noose burned onto his house's wall (which the author
explains away) when he burns his own house.

The narrator brings a
new black cat into his home. This cat, he later finds, is also blind; the white patch on its
chest begins to resemble a gallows (in the narrator's mind), and the narrator is fearful of
hurting the cat. However, one night when he swings an ax at the feline, his wife stops him, and
he goes on to strike her head with the ax. This sudden action will probably
at last convince most readers that the narrator is deranged.

In
finding a place to hide the body, the narrator seals his wife's corpse into the wall of the
basement. When the police finally arrive, the narrator (sure he won't be caught) begins to brag
about the sturdiness of the foundation, but when he strikes the spot where the body is hidden, a
sudden howl reverberates through the cellar. Opening it, they find the body
and the cat who the narrator had mistakenly sealed into the
cavity.

Here is the final irony: the cat that is so much like the
murdered Pluto is the one who exposes the narrator as a
murderer.

Perhaps we should be suspicious before we are. The
narrator does all he can to remove himself from any blame. He tries to blame "a series of
unfortunate events," and later intoxication, for the actions that have led him to this juncture.
His seeming insanity is confusing as we try to follow his story as if he were not at all
demented. What we think we learn at the story's beginning is very different that what we expect
and discover at the end. The narrator's disturbed mind makes it difficult to follow the tale. Our
confusion is not an accident: Poe has led us here.

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Clearly the most ironic element in "The Black Cat" is the
Narrator's own perversely unrealistic and distorted view of the horrible scenario that
unfolds.

The poetic justice I see is
that poorly abused Pluto's "replacement" is the means by which the narrator is exposed to the
police.