What role does mistrust play in the narration of "The Black Cat"?

This is a highly perceptive question. Poe is a master of
using what is termed the "unreliable narrator," a first person narrator that we are
never sure is telling us the complete truth. This story bears considerable resemblance
to "The Tell-Tale Heart," another classic example of Poe's shorter fiction, where the
narrator is clearly insane, and his narrative is shaped accordingly. However, in "The
Black Cat," the narrator makes no such grandiose claims as the narrator of "The
Tell-Tale Heart" does. He appears to come across as a reliable narrator, one who seeks
to report what happened to him and his crime as simply and straightforwardly as he is
able to. Note the following example that suggests this quality of the
narrator:

I am
above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the
disaster and the atrocity. But I am detailing a chain of facts--and wish not to leave
even a possible link
imperfect.

Perhaps the
unreliability of this narrator lies in the way that he is so insistent on looking upon
what happened to him from his purely rational understanding of the world. It is this
that leads him to reject any supernatural explanations that force themselves upon the
reader, and which even his wife suggests, when, for example, she cites the belief that
all black cats are witches who have shapeshifted.