Failing description in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Black Cat"

Poe's short story "The Black Cat" (1843) begins with the narrator stressing his verve and lucidity in relation to "the most wild, yet most homely narrative" that follows. The paradox, however, is that while the he claims to be in command of his faculties, the strange events to be described present a case where, the narrator says, "my very senses reject their own evidence", making the truthfulness of his experience suspect. In consequence, he proceeds to "place before the world, plainly, succinctly, and without comment, a series of mere household events" for the reader to judge and make sense of – in other words, for the reader to experience for herself the awesome events, share their descriptive power, and satisfy the narrator's plea in doing so. In my article, the key idea is that of failing description: as Poe's narrator feels that the reliability of his own reporting skills may have been compromised, he cannot be sure that his descriptions will be in accord with reality. He can only promise to tell the story "plainly, succinctly, and without comment", that is, to try to fail as little as possible in describing what happened. This is unsettling for him, and the readers share the effect, a fusion one can study through the concept of experience. I will do this, inspired by the current theoretical interest on emotion and affect. Methods include the rhetorical devices of ekphrasis (verbal representation of a visual representation) and hypotyposis (vivid description of a visual image), and Wayne C. Booth's notion of the unreliable narrator