How Does Edgar Allan Poe Use Gothic Elements

Edgar Allan Poe is a famous author, who is mainly known for his gothic short stories and poems. These tales are portrayed through the ancient eyes of Edgar Allan Poe. We assume that the many treacherous events in his life inspire these old stories. He uses many different aspects of a story to reveal his medieval literature. One of the very significant ways he portrays the gothic elements of a story is through his characters. He uses his characters to interpret the story and making sure to whisk away the mind of the reader. With his characters, he also has a similar theme in his setting, while it might not always be scary, the environment to the story reveals the eeriness of the fantasy he attempts to portray. While not all his poems and short

The environment brings in the mood and tone for a story, while introducing the time and place where and when a story takes place. With adding many of these critical facts, there is a significant sum of the tales that Poe has told through his short stories and his poems, where he uses setting as an original way when mobilizing his fiction. The place where “The Pit and the Pendulum,” took place, was in a dark, pitch black dungeon. This dungeon was first assumed to have an irregular shape, and it also happened to have a death pit in the middle, where the main character would supposedly fall to his death. These characteristics of the setting all point towards the eeriness of the dungeon where our main character was forcefully held captive. These kinds of old settings surround many of Poe's stories and while not all settings are dark and gloomy, or “death dungeons,” some of the settings are more subtle. But as you learn about the story, you understand how the little things make the setting more gothic, which discovered within the story “The Masque of the Red Death.” This story takes place in a concealed suite which contains seven rooms. As Poe describes the setting, you slowly uncover small gothic portions of the story, and each room becomes slightly more grotesque than the one before it one at a time. Slowly revealing new aspects of the story is Poe’s way of explaining how sometimes in a story, characters aren’t always the primary element and sometimes it is the setting. Portraying the story this way is how Poe used the environment to show the gothic aspects of