Image of Death in Poe's Stories Edgar Allen Poe presen

Edgar Allen Poe presents each theme of his stories through vivid description and suspenseful plots. In a number of stories by Poe, the prevalent image with which he communicates his theme is death. Poe uses the same image of death to produce five different themes in the following five stories: "The Masque of the Red Death," "The Cask of Amontillado," "The Sphinx," "The Tell-Tale Heart," and "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar."

"The Masque of the Red Death" presents a familiar theme with an interesting twist. The main character's situation is as follows: the "Red Death," a disease similar to the plague but more hideous to see, has devastated a country. The prince, sensing imminent danger, arranges for himself and 1,000 of his "light-hearted friends" to be sealed in the "castellated abbeys . . . They resolved to leave means neither of ingress or egress to the sudden impulses of despair or of frenzy from within."

At this point, near the beginning of the story, the fate of these select few becomes obvious. Poe sets the scene for the inevitable death of the 1,000 guests by creating a tomb-like atmosphere within one of the rooms: "But in the western or black chamber the effect of the firelight that streamed upon the dark hangings through the blood-tinted panes, was ghastly in the extreme, and produced so wild a look on the countenances of those who entered that there were few of the company bold enough to set foot within its precincts at

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books . . . A favorite topic with me was the popular belief in omens--a belief which, at this one epoch of my life, I was almost seriously disposed to defend." This third device added superstition to the already nervous character's problems. The final device seemed to be the "coup de grace" for the narrator's emotional state: "Uplifting my eyes . . . they fell upon . . . some living monster of hideous conformation . . . I regarded this terrific animal . . . with a feeling of horror and awe--with a sentiment of forthcoming evil, which I found it impossible to quell by any effort of the reason." With this, the narrator was convinced that this monster was a definite omen of his death. As Poe built the narrator's fear to a peak, he shut it down almost instantly. The narrator's friend, understanding the state of mind his friend was in, rationalized the situation and discovered the monster to be merely a bug crawling on a spider's web which happened to give the appearance that it was descending the mountain in the background. The narrator allowed his emotions to get the best of him, and, as a result, the illusion he perceived became reality in his mind. When illusion becomes reality in the mind of an individual, it can be

Category: Literature - I