Edgar Allan Poe is a literary master; he paints a vivid
environment within which his dread tales occur. Poe’s tales often follow the
path of decay where once beautiful palaces fall to ruin and corruption,
outstanding young gentlemen fall to degeneracy, A proud individual seals an old
friend behind a wall leaving him to starve to death, the last traditions of a
once revered aristocratic estate crumbles to ruin, The reversal of the power
struggle between man and women where man falls into a distant, isolation of
submission and the guilt of a murderer that betrays him to the authorities
through his subconscious and self-inflicted madness.
The haunted Palace Is
described as decadent, powerful and beautiful through elaborate immersive
imagery where a place of once great beauty and many lavish parties and dances occurred
now lay in ruin as a haunt and shadow of its former self clinging to the hallow
corridors of haunted traditions of its former glory.
The Fall of the house
of Usher depicts the downfall of an aristocratic family ruined by mental
illness and an overindulgence in an obsession for preservation at the cost of
one’s humanity. As the estate falls deeper and deeper into decay, so to do the
remaining sickly occupants slowly fade to corpses until the personified estate
crumbles into the ravine, gone and forgotten.
A Dream and A Tell-Tale
Heart Tells of an incident where a man is incessantly irritated by an old
man and in his obsession over this annoyance, commits murder. His own beating
heart betrays him to the local authorities who had almost entirely been
convinced of the man’s innocence. Through the murderer’s hallucination of the “old
man’s” beating heart growing louder and louder in the murderer’s ears; he is driven
to confession to stop his madness in the hallucinations.
These stories and others by Poe not mentioned in name are
aspects of the inevitable grotesque future of humanity. All things come to an
end, but only some are willing to accept it.
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