Now, 'uncomplaining' and 'patient' are fairly obvious, but 'usual' has a double meaning. During the worst of this he describes her (chillingly) as 'uncomplaining' and 'the most usual and the most patient of sufferers' (22). For example, the man admits freely to horribly abusing his wife. If we go too fast, he loses us in his web of words. The more carefully we read, the more the narrator actually reveals to us. To that end, watch out for this guy's fancy language. As such, a helpful way of approaching the narrator's unreliability is by looking for what might be left out of the story, or what the narrator misses, but the reader sees. If we try to sort truth from lies we dismantle the entire story. If we think the narrator is lying about, say, the image of the gallows on the second cat's fur, then is he lying about all the abuse and murder as well? Without any outside perspective, it's all or nothing. If we try to figure out if the narrator is telling the truth, we might fall into the story's dark and bottomless trap. We are put on the defensive from the first lines of the story, when the narrator says he doesn't 'expect' us to believe him, and that he won't even ask us to (1). This means he gives us reason to doubt one or more aspects of what he tells us. Like many Poe narrators this one is unreliable. He's a 'central narrator' because he's talking about things that he did or things that happened to him, rather than things he watched, or heard about.

So, the unnamed narrator of 'The Black Cat' is obviously a 'first person' narrator. You know the narrator is a person because he or she uses pronouns like 'I,' and 'me.' By contrast, a 'third person narrator' is not a definite person, but usually a disembodied voice of unknown origin. A 'first person' narrator is a narrator who is also a person.

The cat edgar allan poe