Comparing Setting and Narrative Style in the Works of Edgar Allen Poe :: Biography Biographies Essays

Setting and Narrative Style in Pit and the Pendulum, House of Usher, Black Cat, and Cask of Amontillado The focus of this essay is the context of use and narrative style used in the works of Edgar Allen Poe. Although many critics prolong different views on Poes writing style, perhaps Harold Bloom summed it up vanquish when he said, Poe has an uncanny talent for exposing our common nightmares and hysteria lurking beneath our guardedly structured lives. ( 7) In many of Poes works, setting is used to paint a dark and gloomy picture in our minds. I think that this was do deliberatly by Poe so that the reader can make a conjunction between darkness and death. For example, in the Pit and the Pendulum, the setting is originally interchange black. As the story unfolds, we see how the setting begins to play an important bureau in how the narrator discovers the many ways he may die. Although he must rely on his senses al i to feel his surroundings, he knows that somewhere in this d ark, 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 bow out himself from the physical and temperal world. The physical oppreses him in the shape of lurid graveyard visions the worldly 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 Poes 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 postponement to collapse, help us to connect the background with the story. Vincent Buranelli says that Poe is able to sysatin an atomosphere which is dark and dull. This is one of the tricks which he laregely derived from the tradition of the Gothic tale (79) . The whole setting in the story provides us with a feeling of melancholy. The Usher mansion appears inactive and barren. The same is true for the narrator. As we picture in our minds the extreme putrefy and decomposistion, we can feelas though the life around it is also crumbling.