Analysis: ThemesGuiltThe exploration of how guilt affects people is a common theme in Poe's short stories, and 'The Black Cat' is no exception. The narrator is consumed by guilt about what he's done. He does not seem to fully realize the amount of his guilt, insisting that he is not bothered by what he has done, but his guilt manifests in subconscious ways. He sees a vision of a cat in a noose in the ruined remains of his burned down house.Guilt also causes him to knock on the exact part of the wall that he buried his wife behind, which causes the trapped cat to cry out and alert the police to the presence of the narrator's wife's corpse. If the narrator was not feeling guilty about murdering his wife, he would have kept his cool when the police were searching his house and possibly gotten away with her murder.TransformationThere are multiple transformations that occur in this short story. The biggest one is the narrator's transformation via alcohol from a family man who loves his wife and pets to a moody maniac who cuts out his cat's eye, hangs his cat, and eventually murders his wife. This transformation is psychological and the result of the narrator's addiction to alcohol.Some of the transformations in the story are physical. After his house burns down, the narrator meets a cat that looks a lot like Pluto, except for the white mark on the cat's chest. This mark shifts by almost imperceptible degrees. By the end of the story it looks like a gallows, which suggests the subconscious guilt the narrator is experiencing as a result of hanging Pluto and also hints to the reader his own fate: death via hanging.