Poe's Stories brief biography of edgar allan poe
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Short Story By Flannery OConnor
| of Usher shows us that as we delve deep into the interior consciousness of Poe’s characters, their irregularity and even madness becomes apparent, and the themes of self, solitude and consciousness become tinged with menace and suspicion. THE POWER OF MEMORY Many of Poe’s narrators tell stories that have already happened. Often, the difference between the situation of the narrator now, and the narrator then, is profound. For example, the narrator of The Black Cat begins what seems to be a domestic story about his pets, but it soon becomes clear that, as a result of the events of the story, the narrator is now in jail. This forewarning of the consequences of the tale provides the story much of its suspense. But a symptom of this voice of hindsight is a kind of unreliability. When we, as readers, know that the character talking is now in jail, for example, it raises the question of whether the narrator might be either hiding some aspect of the story or whether the traumatic events that led to the narrator's incarceration might have warped the narrator's memory of his own experience. Stories like William Wilson begin their remembering with a description of the narrator’s childhood self. Through the lens of adulthood, childhood selves become tainted with Freudian implications and seem less than innocent. Many of the descriptions of children seem to mirror what Poe himself was like a child—intelligent and overactive and dominant—but they also portray childhood as including an awareness of violence that doesn’t seem to belong in a child’s world. Viewing childhood in this way, infused with the subsequent psychological deviance of the adult character, produces aversion of events that can be deceptive and unclear. Drugs and alcohol further cloud the reliability of memory. It is mentioned several times, though never explicitly blamed for any of the narrators troubles, that there is a lot of alcohol drinking and opium taking surrounding the events of the stories, suggesting that the narrator maybe under the influence not just of madness but also inebriation, making it impossible for us, as readers, to trust even an interior monologue. Symbols appear in blue text throughout the Summary and Analysis sections of this LitChart. EYES Body parts are obviously part of the gory, gothic nature of Poe’s world, but eyes are especially noticeable as the medallion of many of the haunting figures in the stories. Ligeia is at first known to us by her large, strangely powerful eyes and it is these orbs that comeback to haunt us at the end. In The Black Cat, it is the cat’s gouged eye that begins the spiral of crime that eventually condemns the narrator. And in The Tell-Tale Heart, without any further explanation of the narrator’s moral opposition to the old man, it is his evil, vulture- like eye that provokes the whole grisly tale. Eyes appear often as part of the otherworldly realm of Poe’s stories and suggest a window to the soul gone-wrong. ARCHITECTURE Some of the most classic motifs of Gothic Literature are architectural - castles, dungeons and gloomy, deserted places can create an expectation of mystery, murder and the paranormal. In each of these eleven stories, locations and structures surround and often facilitate the narrative events and play as leading a role as some of the characters. For example, in The Masque of the Red Death, the strange trail of seven atmospheric apartments, each decorated in a different color and with ominous billowing curtains and candles, traps the masked partiers in a circle of doom, allowing the figure of the Red Death to close them in. In other stories, it is a domestic house or a schoolroom that forces the enclosure and intensification of the characters suffering. And especially in The Pit and the Pendulum, the revelation of the size and shape of the cell, and its subsequent transformation, gives it a life of its own and represents the faceless cruelty of the Inquisition. SYMBOLS SYMBOLS Get hundreds more LitCharts at www.litcharts.com ©2017 LitCharts LLC v.006 www.LitCharts.com Page 8 Note all page numbers for the quotes below refer to the Penguin Classics edition of The Portable Edgar Allan Poe published in Manuscript Found in a Bottle Quotes A feeling, for which I have no name, has taken possession of my soul – a sensation which will admit of no analysis, to which the lessons of bygone times are inadequate, and for which I fear futurity itself will offer me no key. Download 0.58 Mb. Share with your friends:
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