Poe's Stories brief biography of edgar allan poe
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Short Story By Flannery OConnor
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| Related Characters Narrator (MS. Found in a Bottle) (speaker) Related Themes: Page Number 16 Explanation and Analysis The narrator of the short story has boarded a mysterious ship. Ashe spends more time on the ship, he decides to write down everything he experiences there. The narrator can't quite put into words why he chooses to write down his experiences--all he knows is that a strange feeling has taken over his soul. The narrator refuses to think of the past ("bygone days) or look ahead to the future. Instead, he focuses exclusively on the present, and seemingly remains trapped and confused inside his own consciousness. The narrator's behavior is characteristic of Poe's isolated, introspective narrators, and also of people in crises in general. The narrator doesn't have the luxury of ruminating on the past, nor does he have the time or hopefulness to think of the future. Every ounce of brainpower he has is devoted to survival in the present moment. The narrator's behavior also foreshadows the frightening end of the story, in which he is pulled down into the depths of the ocean. It's precisely because the narrator thinks he's going to die soon that he's written down his experiences--even if he doesn't survive the shipwreck, his notes, preserved in the titular bottle, will. The crew glide to and fro like the ghosts of buried centuries their eyes have an eager and uneasy meaning; and when their fingers fall athwart my path in the wild glare of the battle-lanterns, I feel as I have never felt before, although I have been all my life a dealer in antiquities, and have imbibed the shadows of Allan columns at Balbec, and Tadmor, and Persepolis, until my very soul has become a ruin. Related Characters Narrator (MS. Found in a Bottle) (speaker) Related Themes: Related Symbols: Page Number 19 Explanation and Analysis In this passage, the narrator of the story meets the crew of his new ship. The crew members are gaunt and intimidating- -almost like ghosts. It's also in this passage that we learn that the narrator is a collector of antiques--in other words, the relics of bygone centuries, once owned by people who are now dead. He also describes his own soul as a "ruin," making an important connection between the aging, frightening settings of the Gothic and the psychologies of Poe's characters. The passage is important because it establishes the macabre mood of the story (and the entire book) by blurring the line between the past and the present. Although the narrator is trying to focus on the here and now, he has a strange sense of being "pulled" into the supernatural i.e., the world of the dead. Poe will repeat such a dynamic many times in his stories a lonely, rational narrator will be swallowed up by the sheer bulk of the Gothic world of sinister settings, ghosts, and monsters. All in the immediate vicinity of the ship is the blackness of eternal night, and a chaos of foamless water but, about a league on either side of us, maybe seen, indistinctly and at intervals, stupendous ramparts of ice, towering away into the desolate sky, and looking like the walls of the universe. Download 0.58 Mb. Share with your friends:
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