POE ESSAY

Steve Fleming

Mr. Provenzano 3rd Hour

Edgar Allan Poe has many exceptional pieces of writing. Many of which are short stories. Most will notice a common theme in most of these stories. This theme he uses is death. Poe had a gift of writing stories that are creepy, out of the ordinary, and just plain weird. Edgar Allan Poe had an obvious obsession with death in his stories. A majority of all his writings are centered around death or the concept of death. 

One of the best examples of Poe’s obsession of death is the story “The Fall of the House of Usher”. In this story an unnamed narrator is brought upon the house of his childhood friend, Roderick Usher. Poe almost immediately starts off the story talking about death when he describes the house when the narrator says, “the whole mansion and domain there hung an atmosphere peculiar to themselves and their immediate vicinity - an atmosphere which had no affinity with the air of heaven, but which had reeked up from the decayed trees.” (Poe,”The Fall of the House of Usher”,3).  In the story Usher sends the narrator a letter describing “his earnest desire to him”(Poe,”The fall of the House of Usher”,5). The narrator meets Usher for the first time in a while. While the narrator and Usher are talking the narrator describes how Usher suffers in a way of his acute senses. He says, “He suffered much from a morbid acuteness of the senses; the most insipid food was alone endurable; he could wear only garments of certain texture; the odors of all flowers were oppressive; his eyes were tortured by even a faint light; and there were but peculiar sound, and these from stringed instruments, which did not inspire him with horror”(Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher”,6). This description of Usher’s pain is an example of Poe’s liking for death. This is because it describes Usher’s slow torture in his life that he is bringing upon himself. Usher even says himself, “I must perish in this deplorable folly. Thus, thus, and not otherwise, I shall be lost.” (Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher”,6). Later in the story when Usher and the narrator find Madeline still alive, Poe gives another example of death when he writes, “-then, with a low moaning cry, fell heavily inward upon the person of her brother, and in her violent and now final death- agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated.”(Poe,”The Fall of the House of Usher”,18). And with the death of Usher and his sister, Poe adds even more to his theme around death when the narrator flees from the house and looks back as it falls along with it’s owner. “While I gazed, this fissure rapidly widened - there came a fierce breath of the whirlwind - the entire orb of the satellite burst at once upon my sight - my brain reeled as I saw the mighty walls rushing asunder - there was a long tumultuous shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters - and the deep and dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the ‘House of Usher’.” (Poe,”The Fall of the House of Usher”,19). In this last scene when the house crumbles, it is symbolizing the death of the house, for it died with it’s owner, Usher.

Another one of Poe’s stories is “The Pit and the Pendulum”. This entire story is completely centered around death. This story is about a man who knows he is about to be tortured and sentenced to death. Right off the bat the man in the story fear of the dread sentence of death. Yet, he also says, “And then there stole into my fancy, like a rich musical note, the thought of what sweet rest there must be in the grave.”(Poe,”The Pit and the Pendulum”,1). What the man is saying is that he has already gone through so much pain, that the thought of death seems like the best thing for him. The story is told day by day what this man is going through. When the man describes the dark chamber he is trapped in when he first opens his eyes he says, “The blackness of eternal night encompassed me.”(Poe,”The Pit and the Pendulum”,2). Although the man had not died yet, this is still an example of death. In this part of the passage, Poe uses symbolism to describe death. The way he describes the setting of the narrator’s chamber, mimics the feeling of being dead. He does this by using the element of Gothic literature of being in an unknown environment. He expresses the feeling of being dead when the man in the story wakes up in complete darkness, and has no idea where he is. Later in the story the narrator can now see, but is tied to a table. He sees above him a pendulum. Over time he notices it slowly gaining in movement and is slowly moving downward toward him. The last third of the story is a detailed explanation of the mental and soon physical agony that upon the man in the story. Nearing the end of the story, Poe describes numerous forms of death that this man can encounter. The first is when he is waiting slowly for the pendulum to end him, but he escapes by having the rats chew apart his restraints, and bits of him. Once he escapes that, he is then presented with scalding hot walls closing in on him and is left with a choice. Either let himself burn to death, or jump into the deep mysterious pit that he discovered earlier in the story. What happens to the man is unclear and depicts two different ending, depending on the way that you look at it. Just before falling into the pit he says, “There was a discordant hum of human voices! There was a loud blast as of many trumpets! There was a harsh grating as of a thousand thunders! The fiery walls rushed back! An outstretched arm caught my own as I fell, fainting, into the abyss. It was that of General Lasalle. The French army had entered Toledo. The Inquisition was in the hands of its enemies.”(Poe,”The Pit and the Pendulum”,8). One way to look at this ending is that what the narrator was describing was somewhat true and he was actually saved from what had seemed to be certain death. The second way to interpret this ending is that the man died, and what he was describing was his entering into the heavens. Considering that almost none of Poe’s other stories about death had any sliver of hope in them, the second interpretation of the ending seems more likely. This great detail and thought in the ending of this story shows how interested Poe was in death and how it came about people. 

Poe’s story titled, “Berenice”, is a good example of how death and madness, are strongly linked. This story is about a man by the name of Egaeus and his cousin Berenice. He and his Berenice were both very ill. At first, Egaeus describes himself as a man of his mind, but emotion from the heart. He does this when he says, “In the strange anomaly of my existence, feelings with me, had never been of the heart, and my passions always were of the mind.”(Poe,”Berenice”,3).This all changes When in an instance he sees Berenice in a very different way. He basically falls in love with her and immediately talks to her about marriage. Later in the story he is in his chamber and he sees the shadowy outline of Berenice. He is brought back by her perfect teeth when she  smiles at him. He thinks about Berenice’s teeth for a long while, into the evening. The next day he was in deep meditation and thought when one of his servants told him that Berenice had died from an epileptic seizure. He then buries her. He then finds himself in his chamber alone when another one of his servant tells him that they heard noises outside. It ended up being Berenice. Poe then describes how the servant showed Egaeus a spade and bloody clothing. The detail that Poe puts in the story about the blood and gore of Berenice is one way he puts this story around death. Egaeus then knocks over a box that sat next to him and out came dental instruments and as he described, “...thirty-two small, white and ivory-looking substances that were scattered to and fro about the floor.”(Poe,”Berenice”,5). What actually happened was, Egaeus had pulled out every one of Berenice’s teeth, and buried her alive without even knowing that he had done so. Another way he shows his theme of death is by how he makes Egaeus go completely mad. Poe links this madness to death by the way he explains Egaeus burying his own wife alive, and pulling out all of her teeth.

Another one of Poe’s stories is “The Masque of Red Death”. This story is about the plague in a certain city. First off, the plague itself is an example of Poe’s obsession with death. In the story Prince Prospero is supposed to take care of the city because of the plague. He does this by locking people of his choosing, which were only his friends, and having parties. During one of the parties a strange man shows up. He is wearing a mask that looks like he has he plague. Aggravated, the prince goes to stab this man and just as he is about to do it, he dies. The someone from the crowd rips off the mask, but when they do, the man is gone. He had disappeared. The way Poe centers this story around death is with pure symbolism. The man with the mask symbolizes death itself. Poe creates a message in this story in two ways. When the man just disappeared when he was unmasked, Poe is saying that death cannot be seen, nor can it be captured. He also creates a message when he describes the man standing in the shadow of the clock. As explained before the masked man represents death. The clock represents time. The message here is that death is inevitable. When he says that he stands in the shadow of time, he is saying that time is the overseer of death. Poe’s great understanding of death greatly represents his obsession with death. 

Poe’s story, “The Black Cat”, is another good example of his liking of Death. In this story about a man who loved pets. He loved pets and their presence ever since he was a child. He described a certain liking to his cat named Pluto. The narrator describes the cat when he says, “This latter was remarkably large and beautiful animal, entirely black, and sagacious to an astonishing degree.”(Poe,”The Black Death”,1). Near the start of the story, Poe uses some foreshadowing when the narrator talks about his wife’s reference to the bad luck of a black cat. He says, “...,my wife, who at heart was not a little tinctured with superstition, made frequent allusion to the ancient popular notion, which regarded all black cats as witches in disguise.”(Poe,”The Black Cat”,1). Throughout the story the narrator starts to maltreat his pets and would get unusually angry at his pets. He eventually gets to the point where his once favorite cat, Pluto, annoys him to the point where he grabs the cat and cuts out one of it’s eyes. The man then has an urging for violence. He then takes the cat, wraps a noose around its neck, and hung it from the tree. Poe makes his liking for death even more clear here. The way he makes the narrator want and need to do wrong against his animals makes death seem right. In this story, Poe shows how death can be a manipulating force, as it was with the man in the story. This urge that has overtaken the narrator comes back at him when he wakes up to his house aflame. Later, after he had escaped, he noticed something on the only remaining wall from the house. On this wall was the figure of a gigantic cat, which also had a rope tied around its neck. This is a sign that the cat is going to be back, somehow. The cat comes back in the form of a similar cat. After keeping this cat for a while, the narrator starts to hate the cat. At the end of the story he tries to kill the cat with an axe while walking down into the cellar. His wife stops him and makes him very mad, to the point where he kills his wife with the axe. Poe’s simple yet gruesome details in this scene make the his theme of death clear. He writes, “...,I withdrew my arm from her grasp and buried the axe in her brain. She fell dead upon the spot, without a groan.”(Poe,”The Black Cat”,4) The narrator then goes straight to hiding the body. At the very end of the story, the narrator is bragging to himself that he hid the body so well when he hears something coming from the wall. The cat had been sealed in the wall and now, as he watched, the wall was brought down, revealing the body. Poe writes, “It fell bodily. The corpse, already greatly decayed and clotted with gore, stood erect before the eyes of the spectators. Upon its head, with red extended mouth and solitary eye of fire, sat the hideous beast whose craft had seduced me into murder, and whose informing voice had consigned me to the hangman.”(Poe,”The Black Cat”,6). In this part it expresses his love of the love, and feeling of death. This is a great example of how he puts images into a person’s head.

Edgar Allan Poe was clearly obsessed with death. There are numerous examples in many of his stories. Although his obsession of death is somewhat odd, it is also a gift. Poe has the impressive skill of writing in such a way that you can picture the scene in your mind. Overall, Edgar Allan Poe is obviously obsessed with death, but uses it in a most impressive way.