The Writing Style of Edgar A. Poe After reading some 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, it was said, “Poe has an uncanny talent for exposing our common nightmares and hysteria lurking beneath our carefully structured lives. 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 deliberately 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. Though he lives on the brink of the pit, on the very verge of the plunge into unconsciousness, he is still unable to disengage himself from the physical and tempera l world. The physical oppresses him in the shape of lurid graveyard visions; the temporal oppresses him in the shape of a great and deadly pendulum.
It is altogether appropriate, then, that this chamber should be constricting and cruelly ungainly. 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 the background with the story. Poe is able to sustain an atmosphere, which is dark and dull. This is one of the tricks that he adequately uses from the heritage of the Gothic tale. 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 extreme decay and decomposition, we can feel as though the life around it is also crumbling. Narration is also an element in Poe’s short story style that appears to link all of the stories together. He has a type of creativity that lets the reader see into the mind of the narrator or the main character of the story. Many of the characters in Poe’s stories seem to be slightly if not completely deranged. The narrator often seems to have some type of psychological problems.
For example, In Poe’s; “The Cask of Amontillado”, the story opens with a first person narrator speaking about the planning of Fortunato’s death. By the anger and remorse that he has for Fortunato, one might think that this was a recent incident. It is not until the very end of the story that we realize that the entire event occurred fifty years ago. “To the characters in Poe’s story, hate is as inordinate as live. The lust of hate is the inordinate desire to consume and unspeakably possess the soul of the hated one, just as the lust of live is the desire to possess or be possessed be the beloved, utterly.” Poe’s stories often have narrators that feel extreme hate or extreme love for another character in the story.
Another example of Poe’s narrative style is seen in his story entitled “The Black Cat” where the narrator seems to have an obsession with pets. He has one “special” pet that is a black cat. Although their original relationship with each other is one of respect and love, the situation soon changes. The narrator becomes somewhat possessed with the hate for the car. He turns against his wife and stabs his cat in the eye.
By the end of the story, he killed his wife in an attempt to kill the cat. Afterwards, the narrator does not even feel remorse for the wrongful death of his wife. Instead, he is just happy that the cat disappeared. This is just another instance in which the reader wonders what is the driving force begins the narrator’s insanity.” In both Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado”, and his “The Black Cat” the narrators act without morals. There are no doubts, hesitations or second thought to delay the narrative. Both narrators just sought retribution ” Even though there are many more elements to Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories than just his creative use of narration and setting, these are characteristics which has attracted the most attention.
Poe has a way of writing in which he does not have to reveal too much, or paint a pretty picture for the reader in order to attract his attention. Poe’s narrowness is like that of a sword, not that of a bottleneck: it is sufficient rather than constricting. Nothing fortuitous is in his great stories, only the essentials, the minimum of characterization, plot, and ambience. By ridding himself of everything except what is exactly to the point, he achieves individuality of effect. There is also a prominent distinction between right and wrong in Poe’s stories. Viscous characters tend to come to a bad end.
This lets the reader accept these endings as a triumph of good over evil. Poe has created a universe, given it perceptual laws without rejecting the reality of the moral law, and peopled it with characters suitable to such a universe. Putting clear mortality out of bounds helps to give him his uniqueness in his works. After researching Edgar Allan Poe more in depth, I now have a much greater respect for him and a slightly different outlook of his stories. While it is still clear to me that narrative style and setting have a great deal to do with the development of Poe’s short stories, I also realize now that we can’t overlay and entangle with other aspects of the story, making them equally as significant. I will end with a question that I often wonder.
What about Poe’s stories are so appealing to so many people around the world?