The Haunted Palace, By Edgar Allen Poe

“While like ghastly rapid river, through the pale palace door, a hideous throng rush out forever and laugh- but smile no more.” Thus ends The Haunted Palace, by Edgar Allen Poe, haunting any reader with images of depravity and vacuity. Poe often used the sound of words to depict the emotions of a story. Joseph Conrad, a modernist author, not only wrote on similar themes as Poe, but also chose words for their emotions first and meaning second. Conrad’s personal experience in the ivory trade by the Congo compelled him to write what is now his most famous work, Heart of Darkness. In the story, Marlow, a company agent, travels to the Congo and witnesses abuse of slaves, naiveté of other agents, and the truth of the company’s best man: Mr. Kurtz.
Disease, starvation, and gloom pervade the gathering. Conrad emphasized dehumanization by abuse. The slaves are reduced to animal-like behavior. They are “bundles of acute angles” and “nothing earthly now.” (118) One man in particular, “free as air and nearly as thin,” doesn’t even have the strength to eat a biscuit offered him by Marlow. The hellish details bring to mind lines of Eliot’s The Wasteland: “We who are living are now dying with a little patience.” (lines 330-331) These cold descriptions evoke a mixture of repulsion and pity. We are disgusted with the disease and we are embittered at the oppressor and angered by the injustice. We wonder what kind of monster man is to do this to his fellow men. And while we wonder, we hear, “The work was going on. The work!”
Kurtz himself, the most successful ivory supplier in the Congo. Yet for all his wealth, his end is eerily similar to the slaves’ when he says he is “waiting for death.” (177) Marlowe describes his face as ivory, wearing a mixture of pride, power, and terror. Lastly, he utters those haunting words, “The horror, the horror,” and dies alone. The simplicity of the phrase makes it inescapable; yet its ambiguity leaves us with an unsatisfied shuddering. The deathbed scene, too, is bare with a few sparing details. Marlowe holds one candle that he blows out after the repeated phrase. This one action stamps the finality on Kurtz’s conclusion. After we have been used up- whether by scrambling after our own appetites or scrambling after others’- all we have is “waiting for death” and all we have while waiting is contemplation of “the horror.” Man’s ultimate reality is his depravity. No amount of civility can fix that. Those who can will live the life of “desire, temptation and surrender.” (177) and find that it is bankrupt. Man is chained within Plato’s cave and Conrad doesn’t seem to give anyone a way out. The shadows that contented us before are now a horror. Conrad leaves us paralyzed with the echo of the two words and a candle being blown