As the story opens, the narrator is in jail, awaiting his execution on the following day. Find and write two of the lines from the story that show...

Poe never explicitly says if the narrator is in prison. Instead, the narrator says, at the beginning of the story, that he writes because “to-morrow I die, and to-day I would unburthen my soul.” The assumption is that the narrator is a condemned prisoner. There is another indication that he may be in prison at the end of the story, when the narrator says that the cat, in making the existence of the murder known...

Poe never explicitly says if the narrator is in prison. Instead, the narrator says, at the beginning of the story, that he writes because “to-morrow I die, and to-day I would unburthen my soul.” The assumption is that the narrator is a condemned prisoner. There is another indication that he may be in prison at the end of the story, when the narrator says that the cat, in making the existence of the murder known to the police, had “consigned me to the hangman.” It’s pretty clear that he’s been caught.

Another question (maybe a better one) about the frame is, why bother? In other words, why does Poe choose to tell this story in this way, as the written confession of a man who has already been found guilty of a horrible crime and who is about to be executed? Especially since the framing fiction gets such scant attention we have to guess from just a few words what the present state of the narrator is. The answer I think lies in Poe’s desire to create the maximum emotional effect, in this case horror and dread. The frame provides a context within which the story can be conveyed to the reader (the fictive written confession), but also changes the way the reader encounters those events—rather than using a third person narrator to “show” the reader what happens, everything we know comes from the point of view of a homicidal maniac. The events he relates are horrifying, but perhaps even more horrifying is his madness.