While Pitty Sing plays a divisive role in the ending of the story and the family’s lives to lighten the mood of a near-horror scene, Shmoop’s outright exclusion of anything above trite plot analysis implies otherwise.
O’Connor, basing her selection of the cat’s name on a character from The Mikado, a comical drama famed for its trivialization of death, insinuates a relationship between morals to both stories through the not-so-simple cat. Like Gilbert and Sullivan, O’Connor implies the humor found in the “unsparing exposure of human weakness and follies” and criticizes the family’s neglect of an important character (Gilbert). O’Connor evidences her satirize the nightmarish environment by indicating that the cause of multiple deaths to be a seemingly inept house cat named Pitty Sing.…show more content… Although the narrator humorously sympathizes with her literal representation of a “scaredy cat,” he also implies that the resulting inhumane treatment of innocent animals has repercussions. Initially, the grandmother’s need to stow the cat away in a basket reveals the cat’s faulty, unwanted role in the family and the possibility of the cat’s history of ill will towards the family. Although loosely stowed away like a lofty secret, the cat escapes the basket, resulting in the unfortunate chain of events that compose the story’s tragic ending. The cat’s escape from the basket provides another literal representation of the commonly used phrase, “The cat is out of the bag,” indicating the accidental release of critically hidden information. The cat’s existence as escaped information foreshadows O’Connor’s introduction of the aggressively mentioned, but stowed away, Misfit. As the cat attacks Bailey, O’Connor asserts the cat’s unexpected greater understanding of the natural