Edgar Allan Poe Essay

Edgar Allan Poe Essay

How does E.A. Poe explore the themes of horror and obsession in his

short stories?

In Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories the black cat and The Tell Tale

Heart, both terrify the reader by making them believe they are the

person going through these terrifying tales, as they believe they can

hear the heart pound under the floor boards as in The Tell Tale Heart.

Or they feel very cocky as showing the police round the basement 2 – 3

times until it all goes wrong, they feel it was them who committed

these awful crimes. In the Black cat short story, it is the madness of

the characters that creates the perfect scary story, the man trying to

kill the cat and eventually killing his wife.

Poe creates an atmosphere of horror by making the reader feel they are

the main character, that they have just driven an axe in to there

wives head. He wants the reader to feel scared and unsure, to be

scared next time they hear a soft beating sound that is unexplainable,

to remember the story and haunt you for as long as you live. The

techniques he uses to do this are simple, but very, very affective, he

repeats words and describes the most minute thing, for example, “It

was open – wide, wide open – and I grew furious as I gazed upon it. I

saw it with perfect distinctness – all a dull blue, with a hideous

veil over it that chilled the very marrow in my bones: for I had

directed the ray as if by instinct, precisely upon the damned spot.”

That shows how he describes almost everything giving you a great idea

of what was happening and how he repeated words to give a incredible

sense of fear.

Another method used by Edgar Allan Poe to illustrate the obsessions of

his characters is that they all were slightly ...

... middle of paper ...

...es the perfect horror story of his time. As the

when the story’s are read in the present they do not scare us as we

have seen horror films with people having objects rammed through there

heads and horrible things that would scare the hair of a little

child’s back. But even how descriptive the story is it wouldn’t scare

you because of our modern day society. The techniques used by Edgar

Allan Poe created tension and fear, wanting to know what happened

next. And that is what happened. Edgar Allan Poe is successful through

being able to reflect his life into his work, create new techniques

for generations onwards to use, he gave some of the best examples of

narrative stories and created some of the most describing pieces of

work ever. In most peoples eyes he succeeded in being one of the top

horror writers of all time, if not the most remembered and the best.