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The Destructive Power of Guilt Guilt and remorse are emotions that are often experienced by humans in general, and the emotional and physical response to these emotions can be very powerful and misleading. In "the ", Edgar Allen Poe spins a wondrously horrific p ....

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.... to project his hatred of self onto his disfigured cat. As his notions of remorse further deteriorate his unsound mind, he destroys the object and source of his offense. With guilt eating away at his conscious, the man's sanity falls further into degradation, and he unleashes his cruelty on an innocent victim. The narrator describes the force of destruction that drives him as "the spirit of Perverseness", and this impulse causes him to remorsefully hang the cat because he knows that it loves him and it is an act he should not commit (para.9). The appearance of the second black cat casts a spellbinding power over an already guilt sickened min ....