Coraline

Upon moving into her new home, Coraline explores the grounds surrounding it and comes upon a large, “haughty”-looking black cat. The cat sees Coraline, but avoids her and runs away from her, not wishing to be petted. To her great surprise, Coraline encounters the cat again after stumbling upon the other mother’s world. While Coraline is exploring the grounds surrounding the other mother’s approximation of her house, the cat approaches Coraline—and this time, it speaks to her clearly, in English. The cat’s voice, Coraline observes, sounds oddly like the one at the back of her own head. The cat is clearly knowledgeable as to the other mother’s origins and intentions, but it is just as “haughty” as Coraline believed it to be when she first saw it—it cryptically refuses to answer almost all of her questions about the other mother, and instead offers Coraline only the most basic advice and information she absolutely needs to survive (such as when it tells her that the other mother loves games and challenges.) The cat seems contemptuous of the other mother and sure that she can be defeated, and but when the other mother seals off the entrances and exits to her world—which the cat has, for time untold, used to pass between the two worlds with ease—the cat becomes deeply afraid of being trapped in the other mother’s “web.” Wise, mercurial, stealthy, and proud, the cat is Coraline’s companion in both worlds—though the cat never seems particularly attached to Coraline or desirous of her affection. The cat is, like the rats, perhaps an ancient entity simply taking the form of a cat for the time being—but whereas the rats are the other mother’s minions, the cat seems to be her opponent. The novel leaves interpretation of the cat’s past, motives, and mysteries up to the reader, just as it does in the case of the rats, the other mother, and Coraline’s house itself.