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Edgar Allen Poe And His Works

The short story writer which I have chosen to research is Edgar Allen
Poe. After reading one of his works in class, I realized that his mysterious
style of writing greatly appealed to me. Although many critics have different
views on Poe's writing style, I think that Harold Bloom summed it up best when
he said, "Poe has an uncanny talent for exposing our common nightmares and
hysteria lurking beneath our carefully structured lives. " ( 7) For me, this is
done through his use of setting and narrative style.

In many of Poe's works, setting is used to paint a dark and gloomy
picture in our minds. I think that this was done deliberatly by Poe so that the
reader can make a connection between darkness and death. For example, in the
"Pit and the Pendulum", the setting is originally pitch black. As the story
unfolds, we see how the setting begins to play an important role in how the
narrator discovers the many ways he may die. Although he must rely on his
senses alone to feel his surroundings, he knows that somewhere in this dark,
gloomy room, that death awaits him. Richard Wilbur tells us how fitting the
chamber in "The Pit and the Pendulum" actually was. "Though he lives on the
brink of the pit, on the very verge of the plunge into unconciousness, he is
still unable to disengage himself from the physical and temperal world. The
physical oppreses him in the shape of lurid graveyard visions; the temporal
oppreses him in the shape of an enormous and deadly pendulum. It is altogether
appropriate, then, that this chamber should be constricting and cruelly angular"
(63).

Setting is also an important characteristic is Poe's "The Fall of the
House of Usher". The images he gives us such as how both the Usher family and
the Usher mansion are crumbling from inside waiting to collapse, help us to
connect...

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