Term Paper Edgar Allan Poes Infatuation with Death

Edgar Allan Poes Infatuation with Death Ralph Emerson once wrote, Talent alone cannot make the writer. There must be a man behind the book. Edgar Allan Poe acquired the ability to write Gothic horror through the tragedies that existed in his life. At three years old Poe lost his mother and father. Grief and sadness overwhelmed Poes childhood and eventually his literary style. By temperament and mournful personal experience, Poe was drawn into the contemporary cult of death (Kennedy 111-33.) In his shocking and lurid tales of horror, The Masque of the Red Death, The Tell-Tale Heart, and The Cask of Amontillado, Edgar Allan Poe reveals his obsession with death and suffering through the development of his characters and†¦show more content†¦The idea of the protagonist fighting a counterpart occurs so often in Poes works that critics often suggest that it indicates Poes attempts to work out, through his writings his own inner conflicts (Chua 350.) In the short story, the nameless narrator attempts to defend his normality, yet he confesses to murdering an old man. He has nothing against this man except, his pale blue eye. In John Chuas critique, Critic Charles E. May, however, he interprets the eye bit as an organ of vision but as the homonym of I. Thus, what the narrator ultimately wants to destroy is the self, and he succumbs to this urge when he could no longer contain his overwhelming sense of guilt (Chua 351.) This irrational fear creates the conflict and leads to the narrators decision to kill the man. He watches the old man sleep every night for a week. On the eighth night the man hears the narrator and wakes up. The narrator remains in the dark room for hours until he eventually acts on his temptation, screams, and murders the old man. He carefully dismembers the body and hides him underneath the floorboards. Three police men knock on the door, after convincing the officers nothing bad happened they sit down to chat. Suddenly, the n arrator hears a noise that gets louder and louder until the narrator freaks out. At that moment, he confesses to murdering the old man and shows them where he hid the body. In theShow MoreRelated Biography of Edgar Allan Poe Essay11890 Words   |  48 PagesBiography of Edgar Allan Poe Edgar Allan Poe was born at 33 Hollis Street, Boston, Mass., on January 19, 1809, the son of poverty stricken actors, David, and Elizabeth (born Arnold) Poe. His parents were then filling an engagement in a Boston theatre, and the appearances of both, together with their sojourns in various places during their wandering careers, are to be plainly traced in the play bills of the time. Paternal Ancestry The father ofRead MoreANALIZ TEXT INTERPRETATION AND ANALYSIS28843 Words   |  116 Pagesof the conflict and establishes some new equilibrium or stability (however tentative and momentary). The resolution is also referred to as the conclusion or the denoument, the latter a French word meaning â€Å"unknotting† or â€Å"untying†. Although the terms exposition, complication, crisis, falling action and resolution are helpful in understanding the relationship among the parts of some kinds of narrative, all plots, unfortunately, do not lend themselves to such neat and exact formulations. Even when