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

Setting and Narrative drift in Pit and the Pendulum, House of Usher, Black Cat, and Cask of Amontillado The focus of this undertake is the mise en scene and narrative style used in the works of Edgar Allen Poe. Although many another(prenominal) critics have different views on Poes writing style, perhaps Harold Bloom summed it up best when he said, Poe has an uncanny talent for exposing our common nightmares and hysteria lurking infra our carefully structured lives. ( 7) In many of Poes works, setting is used to samara a olive-drab and gloomy picture in our minds. I hold 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 to begin with pitch black. As the story unfolds, we see how the setting begins to play an fundamental role in how the narrator discovers the many ways he whitethorn die. Although he must rely on his senses alone to feel his surroundings, he kno ws that somewhere in this dark, gloomy room, that death awaits him. Richard Wilbur tells us how fitting the sleeping accommodation in The Pit and the Pendulum actually was. Though he lives on the sceptre of the pit, on the very verge of the plunge into unconciousness, he is still ineffectual to disengage himself from the physical and temperal world. The physical oppreses him in the shape of lurid memorial park visions the temporal oppreses him in the shape of an enormous and deadly pendulum. It is altogether appropriate, then, that this sleeping accommodation should be constricting and cruelly angular (63). Setting is also an of import characteristic is Poes The Fall of the House of Usher. The images he gives us much(prenominal) as how both the Usher family and the Usher signaling are crumbling from inside(a) waiting 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 vacant and barren. The same is true for the narrator. As we picture in our minds the perfect decay and decomposistion, we can feelas though the life around it is also crumbling.