Fear In Poe's Short Stories

Thich Nhat Hanh once said, “Fear keeps us focused on the past or worried about the future”. People are dominated by fear, which influences every step of their life and the decisions they make. A majority of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories incorporates fear into the motivation of its characters. Poe’s short stories and poems such as “The Raven”, “The Tell­Tale Heart”, and “The Cask of Amontillado” are all gothic. They are mysterious, suspenseful, and involve consternation. Poe uses the dark hallway, the old man’s eye, and the Amontillado to tie three of his works together through their representation of fears and weaknesses.
To begin, Poe’s poem “The Raven” mentions a dark and empty hallway that exemplifies the loneliness of the narrator. In the text,
For instance, Poe writes, “He had the eye of a vulture ­­ a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold;” (1). This evidence shows that the protagonist personally despises the eye and is terrified by the presence of it. The first person point of view in the story helps one understand that he feels uneasy when he merely glances at it. The eye is equivalent to an enemy for him. The external conflict arose because of the old man’s eye in the first place, and it is the narrator’s sole motivation to get rid of it. All in all, the narrator’s predominant fear in the story is illustrated by the antagonist’s
A desolate hallway in “The Raven” symbolizes the narrator’s terror of being alone.“The Tell­Tale Heart” displays the protagonist’s fear of the old man’s eye. “The Cask of Amontillado” shows Fortunato’s predilection towards wine. One can presume that Poe’s writings reflected emotions and feelings that he has endured throughout many hardships in his life. However, these events inspired his eerie and ominous writings. Ultimately, one can conclude that the fears Poe faced in his traumatic childhood, inspired him to compose his apprehensive