The Eerie And Bizarre Of Poe's Short Stories

Marvin Garantoza
Liz Smith
English 1B
26 September 2014
The Eerie and Bizarre of Poe Through all the deaths and fatality of his stories, Edgar Allan Poe is a man of stories that are eerie and bizzare. Poe is best known for his dark and gothic fiction where it seemed very uncomfortable to read but yet pleasing to the reader. His themes in his stories would deal with death that would include physical signs, effects of decomposition, and premature burial. In the book Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing by Edgar V. Roberts, Poe 's short stories are written. They are “The Cask of Amontillado”, “The Fall of the House of Usher”, The Masque of the Red Death”, The Black Cat, and “The Tell-Tale Heart”. Each of these stories have
The narrator has a drinking problem which causes him to have violent mood swings towards his first owned cat, named Pluto, and his wife. One night, the narrator rages at Pluto by stabbing out it 's eye with his knife and hangs Pluto the next day. The narrator then obtains another cat shortly after. Just like Pluto, he attempts to injure it but the wife desperately tries to defend the cat. The narrator turns on his wife and kills her while the cat disappears. Considering the different options to hide the body, the narrator takes advantage of the damp walls in the basement and hides his wife within them. Four days after the murder, the police arrive to the narrator 's apartment and tries to find the dead body. In the story, the author writes that the police found the dead body through the walls and narrator finds the missing cat. Poe writes “It fell bodily. The corpse, already greatly decayed and clotted with gore, stood erect before the eyes of the spectators. Upon its head, with red extended mouth and solitary eye of fire, sat the hideous beast whose craft had seduced me into murder, and whose informing voice had consigned me to the hangman”(Poe). This story is very bizarre because it describes the cruelty towards animals and domestic violence. It 's pretty typical for someone to get into a vicious mood from drinking to
The story is about an unnamed narrator who would go to an old man 's apartment every night and observed him while he slept. One night, the old man wakes up in fear and cries out. The narrator continues to stand there like he always had but shortly after, he attacks and murders the old man. The narrator claims that the old man 's eye is like the eyes of a vulture and describes it as an evil eye. The old man 's eye was the only reason why the narrator despised him. According to Jennifer Bouchard 's “Literary Contexts in Short Stories: Edgar Allan Poe 's 'The Tell Tale Heart ' “, she describes the relation between the narrator and old man 's eye. She writes “Madness is an important motif in the story as the narrator insists that he is not mad while detailing his act of murder upon a man with whom he had no other problem than his ugly eye”(Bouchard). The reason why this story is so eerie is because first of all, the narrator is constantly stalking an old man at his apartment. This can be very frightening to the reader because this can actually happen. It may not be so common, but this is something that Poe wrote that 's more realistic and practical. On the other hand, stalking someone because of the look of the old man 's eye seems very strange. A lot of murders happen because of what people look like but focusing their hate on just an eye is