What is fear? Is it being in a prison so dark a person can not see in front of them? In this complete darkness the narrator finds himself eating and drinking, then passing out on a cold floor. When he wakes he is somewhere else in the dark cell. Or is it a cell? Could it be a tomb? Just when he thinks the cell is so big he finds himself almost falling into a pit. He eats and sleeps again. Where or how will he wake? Does he wake from his drugged food? In this story “The Pit and the Pendulum,” by Edgar Allan Poe, he tells the terrifying struggle of a man dealing with fear, torture, and confinement.
In this complete darkness the main character has no idea where he is. Could it be a tomb, or is he in prison waiting to be hanged? The unknown narrator shows fear by the opening of story when he states, “I was sick unto death, with that long agony, and when they at length bound me, and I was permitted to sit, I felt that my senses were leaving me.” (Poe 1.) He felt this way every time he would take a drink of what little water was left for him. He would drink it, fall asleep and wake up somewhere else. When he feels the walls are beginning to close in on him and he is going to fall into a pit, he realizes the water he has been drinking is drugged. It is when he stands up he realizes he is in a dark cell with a deep pit in the middle. At the bottom of the pit is water. “And then there stole into my fancy, like a rich musical note, the thought of what sweet rest there must be in grave.” (Poe 2.) The character begins to think why am I here? Am I going to die here not knowing why? No one gave him a reason why he was taken and put in a dark cell. He knew it was the Spanish Inquisition but as far as he was concerned, he ...
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...ryday in fear they seem to lose touch with reality. Our minds are so fragile; it does not take much to make them break. We can see and hear things that are not really there. Our imagination can sometimes get the best of us. Is this what happened to the character in, “The Pit and the Pendulum?” Was he crazy?
Works Cited
Poe, Edgar Allen. “The Pit and the Pendulum.” Poe, Edgar Allan. The Pit and the Pendulum. Mankato, Minn.: Creative Education, 1980. Print
Blooms Literacy Reference Online. Facts on File. Web. Mar. 2010.
Giordano, Robert. "A short biography of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)."
27 June 2005. 8 March 2007
Cherokee High School. :Literary Reference Center:. EBSCOhost. Web. 7 Mar. 2010. http://web.ebscohost.com/lrc/
Web. 31 Mar. 2010. .
Edgar Allan Poe, Born Jan 19 1809, was better at writing suspenseful stories, usually with a twist at the end. In the story, “The Pit and the Pendulum”, Poe describes an unnamed narrator telling the story of a man who was put in prison, drugged, and sentenced to death
Poe, Edgar A. "The Pit and the Pendulum." Poestories. N.p., n.d. Web. 14 Feb. 2014.
The setting of a story lays the foundation for how a story is constructed. It gives a sense of direction to where the climax is headed. The setting also gives the visual feedback that the readers need to picture themselves into the story and comprehend it better. Determining the setting can be a major element towards drawing in the reader and how they relate to a story. A minor change in the plot can drastically alter to perception, interpretation, and direction of the message that is delivered. These descriptive elements can be found within these short stories: “the Cask of Amontillado”, “The Storm”, “The Things They Carried”, “Everyday Use”, and “The Story of an Hour”.
The Cask of Amontillado, written by Edgar Allan Poe, is a chilling story about two men named Fortunato and Montresor. The story begins with a narrator voicing his anger and resentment towards a man named Fortunato for “a thousand injuries” and insults. Our narrator sees Fortunato and lures him down into his vaults, or “catacombs,” on the premise of verifying that some wine is a certain type. Fortunato was already drunk, and had a cold. Eventually, the men reach a crypt, and the narrator chains Fortunato to the wall. Not stopping there, the narrator begins to trap him in the hole by filling it with bricks. Fortunato is quiet, until the hole is nearly filled, when he screams and then tells the narrator that it was a good joke. The narrator’s name is revealed to be Montresor. Montresor calmly takes the last brick and prepares to slide it into place, but stops and listens. All he hears are the jingling of bells. Then Montresor puts in the last brick, hence sealing Fotunato’s fate. There is chilling irony woven all throughout The Cask of Amontillado. It isn’t until the end of the story that we discover the tale took place fifty years before. Montresor’s vile deed’s motivation can be largely attributed to social class, fulfilling what he considered to be “just retribution” for the unnamed insult that was given him by Fortunato.
To some of the most fanatic and most creative Poe fans the question may arise: could I reproduce the great Edgar’s works? And if the answer is yes, then how? We might assume that Edgar Allan Poe is one of the most recognizable authors and poets not only of his age but of the whole modern literature, but still we would face numerous difficulties in trying to imitate his writing. Also, placing him into a certain style or literary movement would give us some really tough hours. Poe can be considered either a Romantic or Gothic writer but we could find a number of arguments and counterarguments for this matter. Poe, in fact, reinterpreted the whole Gothic horror style and created a unique, distinct brew of Gothic fiction, Romanticism and his own gloomy mind. On the basis of A Cask of Amontillado and The Tell-Tale Heart, we can deduct that despite the uniqueness of Poe’s works there are some recurring elements in Poe’s short-stories. Generally, if anyone wanted to write a Poesque short story, here are the ingredients: a fine case of murder, a big spoonful of madness and a pinch of revenge.
Edgar Allan Poe is known to observe humans reaction to… Both Poe, in his short stories “The Fall of the house of Usher”, and Bierce, in his short story “One of the Missing”, expose their characters to fear.
The writing style of Edgar Allan Poe shows the writer to be of a dark nature. In this story, he focuses on his fascination of being buried alive. He quotes, “To be buried alive is, beyond question, the most terrific of these [ghastly] extremes which has ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality.” page 58 paragraph 3. The dark nature is reflected in this quote, showing the supernatural side of Poe which is reflected in his writing and is also a characteristic of Romanticism. Poe uses much detail, as shown in this passage, “The face assumed the usual pinched and sunken outline. The lips were of the usual marble pallor. The eyes were lusterless. There was no warmth. Pulsation had ceased. For three days the body was preserved unburied, during which it had acquired a stony rigidity.” page 59 paragraph 2. The descriptive nature of this writing paints a vivid picture that intrigues the reader to use their imagination and visualize the scene presented in the text. This use of imagery ties with aspects of Romanticism because of the nature of the descriptions Poe uses. Describing the physical features of one who seems dead is a horrifying perspective as not many people thing about the aspects of death.
The sanity of his storytelling discontinues when he explained to the readers that he loved the old man, but his mind went against him; deciding to stalk and kill the old man. The description of the narrator’s thoughts the eighth day he stalked the aged man where… “Presently I heard a slight groan, and I knew it was the groan of mortal terror. It was not a groan of pain or of grief --oh, no! --it was the low stifled sound that arises from the bottom of the soul when overcharged with awe. I knew the sound well. Many a night, just at midnight, when all the world slept, it has
?The Cask of Amontillado? by Edgar Allan Poe is a story about two men at a carnival, the narrator Montresor, who is being eaten by jealousy, and Fortunato, a rich drunk man that has a weakness for wine. It is through deception that Montresor achieves his revenge against Fortunato. He did not believe that killing Fortunato is wrong because of the insults and injures Fortunato brought against him. ?The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne.? (Poe, 75) says Montresor. Montresor brought Fortunato down into the catacomb. This was his chance for revenge.
Edgar Allen Poe was an English short-story writer whose work reflects the traditional Gothic conventions of the time that subverted the ambivalence of the grotesque and arabesque. Through thematic conventions of the Gothic genre, literary devices and his own auteur, Edgar Allan Poe’s texts are considered sublime examples of Gothic fiction. The Gothic genre within Poe’s work such as The Tell-Tale Heart, The Black Cat, and The Raven, arouse the pervasive nature of the dark side of individualism and the resulting encroachment of insanity. Gothic tales are dominated by fear and terror and explore the themes of death and decay. The Gothic crosses boundaries into the realm of the unknown, arousing extremes of emotion through the catalyst of disassociation and subversion of presence. Gothic literature utilises themes of the supernatural to create a brooding setting and an atmosphere of fear.
During the American literary movement known as Transcendentalism, many Americans began to looking deeper into positive side of religion and philosophy in their writing. However, one group of people, known as the Dark Romantics, strayed away from the positive beliefs of Transcendentalism and emphasized their writings on guilt and sin. The most well-known of these writers is Edgar Allan Poe. Poe was a dark romantic writer during this era, renown for his short stories and poems concerning misery and macabre. His most famous poem is “The Raven”, which follows a man who is grieving over his lost love, Lenore. In this poem, through the usage of tonal shift and progression of the narrator’s state of mind, Poe explores the idea that those who grieve will fall.
Edgar Allan Poe is a popular all around the world. He is seen as a dark, mysterious writer. Looking into his life experiences, it explains why his stories are so dark. Readers who do not know his background stories may think he is a crazy, mentally unstable man. But to really understand the depth of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories, it is important and useful to look into the reasoning of why the stories are so dark.
The Sleeper, by Edgar Allan Poe, was first published in the Poems of 1831; this poem has since been revised from its current version which was printed in 1845. This poem was written during the Romanticism Period. This time period is defined as a time in which poets began to “rebel against the Neoclassical restrictions and dominance of reason as poetic aim. Romantic poetry celebrated the imagination over rationality, passion, and dreams over reason and external reality, and isolated individuality over collective humankind. Romantic poetry looked to celebrate both the supernatural and elevate the commonplace.” (Henriksen) Poe’s imagination prevails in this lyric poem. The speaker of the poem experiences an internal conflict while mourning the death of a loved one.
The Depiction of Fear in The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe
American Author, Edgar Allan Poe, wrote short stories that were completely different than any of the other stories you would hear during the nineteenth century. They did in fact though, have a great impact on people’s lives. Poe’s stories were mysterious, dark and sinister. People credit Poe with the invention of Science Fiction and Mystery genres. Poe had an impact on not only American Literature, but also on many writers through the years and even singers today. Those are some reasons why Poe should and is included in a school’s curriculum.