something has happened in the narrator’s house. It is still unsolved until the end of the story.
At the end of the story, the cat which suddenly disappears after the narrator kills his wife, appears again on the last day of the policemen’s
investigation and it is in the narrator’s wife’s tomb and is sitting on his wife’s head It is a big mystery about how it can be inside the “tomb”
Because when the narrator built the wall up again after putting his wife’s body, he must be very concentrate on the things in front of him, such as
bricks, wall and the hole where his wife is lying. He must have noticed if there was something go into the wall. So there must be no chance for the cat
to sneak into it. From these explainations, there are enough evidents to prove that the
black cat itself is the biggest mystery of this story. As a conclusion, the fire incident which happens after the murder of Pluto, the relief fo a big cat with
ropes around its neck, the unknown place of the second black cat from, the similarity with the previous cat, the white fur on its chest that changes every
day and its appearance in the wall are unsolve and unexplainable of this story and is considered as mystery element of the story.
3.1.3. Berenice Berenice is one of the few Poe stories whose narrator is named. It is
written in old English word and is very hard to understand. In this story, he is described as a quite old and double personality’s person. Usually, a
double personality’s person is a very mysterious person because we can not understand him very well. It can be said that it is very hard to know and
communicate to this kind of person. So, the mystery of this story is the narrator himself. The double personality of him can be seen from the
quotation below: “…
- wonderful how total an inversion took place in the character of my commonest thought. The realities of the
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world affected me as visions, and as visions only, while the wild ideas of the land of dreams became, in turn, not the
material of my every-day existence, but in very deed that existence utterly and solely in itself. ...”
Patrick. F. Quinn, 1984 : 226 The mystery of this story is found from the way he thinks about the
health condition of himself and Berenice, his future wife. The diseases that he and Berenice have are very strangely formed. He does not know how the
disease comes. He himself looks Berenice as a mystery as well. He wonders how she can get the disease and the disease changes her very much; changes
her into another person. As we can see from the quotation below: “...Oh, gorgeous yet fantastic beauty Oh, sylph amid the
shrubberies of Arnheim Oh, Naiad among its fountains And then - then all is mystery and terror, and a tale which
should not be told. Disease - a fatal disease, fell like the simoon upon her frame; and, even while I gazed upon her,
the spirit of change swept over her, pervading her mind, her habits, and her character, and, in a manner the most subtle
and terrible, disturbing even the identity of her person Alas the destroyer came and went - and the victim -where
is she? I knew her not - or knew her no longer as Berenice...”
Patrick. F. Quinn, 1984 : 226 He is so addicted to Berenice’s teeth since he pays attention to all parts
of her face. The point that makes it becomes a mystery is why he is addicted to the teeth. Berenice is a beautiful girl, so there must be many parts of her
body that he can be abbsessed of. In the story, Berenice who has died on one evening becomes alive at
night when Egaues visits her coffin. We do not know if she is really alive or just Egaues’ imagination because he is talking about the band that go round
her jaws is broken. It could be only his imagination since he has obsessed on her teeth so maybe it is his obsession which takes control his brain to see
that she smiles to him again so that he can see her teeth again. But it also could be Berenice has not died yet since her disease is very strange, maybe
she is just uncounscious or comma. And at the end of the story, the servant
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tells Egaues that there is a disfigured body that is alive and it should be Berenice. If she is really alive, then it is a big mystery of how she can be
considered as dead before, or it could be like the story of mummy or vampire which also could be alive again after death. We can see his point of
view from the quotation below: “God of heaven — is it possible? Is it my brain that reels
— or was it indeed the finger of the enshrouded dead that stirred in the white cerement that bound it? Frozen with
unutterable awe I slowly raised my eyes to the countenance of the corpse. There had been a band around the jaws, but, I
know not how, it was broken asunder. The livid lips were wreathed into a species of smile, and, through the
enveloping gloom, once again there glared upon me in too palpable reality, the white and glistening, and ghastly teeth
of Berenice. ...” Patrick. F. Quinn, 1984 : 232
There always a book with a good statement in French which well described about Egaues situation or thought. We do not know if the book is
opened by Egaues himself or supernaturally opened by someone else. We can not know about it because there is no explaination about it. He always
forgets about what has happened before and when he realizes about that book then he will agree with the statement on the book. For example when
he has lifted her teeth out and forgets what he has done, he sees the opened pages of a book and what he does is just the same as what the book tells. As
we can see from the quotation below: “…The words were the singular but simple words of the
poet Ebn Zaiat: — Dicebant mihi sodales si sepulchrum amicae visitarem, curas meas aliquantulum fore levatas.
Why then, as I perused them, did the hairs of my head erect themselves on end, and the blood of my body become
congeal [congealed] within my veins? …”
Patrick. F. Quinn, 1984 : 232
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Overall, the most mysterious thing in this short story is the way Egaues thinks about something. He thinks like a double personality person which is
very confusing, strange and hard to understand.
3.2.Horror
We always can find horror in Gothic fictions. It is a usual ingredient of Gothic fiction. The readers can have a feeling of fear, macabre and haunted from
this element. In order to find out how the writer builds the atmosphere of horror and makes the readers feel fear, I will analyse it by focusing on the setting of the
stories. As been cited in An Introduction to Fiction, by X. J. Kennedy 1976 : 16,
17, setting is simply the time and place of a story, and in most cases the details of description are given to the reader directly by the narrator. In novels, the novelist
can waste pages of prose on detail of setting just as they can describe characters down to such minutiae as the contents of their pockets. But short story writers,
hemmed in by limitations of space, rarely have such luxury and most ordinarily limit themselves to very selective descriptions of time and place.
The setting is greatly influential in Gothic stories. When a writer like Edgar Allan Poe goes into great detail in his descriptions, it is likely that
atmosphere, the emotional aura surrounding a certain setting, is more important to him than the actual physical locale. Setting is an important Gothic conversation. It
plays an important role to create a dark, highly Gothic fiction that makes people feel horror and terror. On the other hand, it is not only evokes the atmosphere of
horror and dread, but also portrays the deterioration of its world. The decaying, ruined scenery implies that at one time there was a thriving world. At one time the
abbey, castle, or landscape was something treasured and appreciated. Now, all that lasts is the decaying shell of once thriving dwelling.
3.2.1. The Oval Portrait
