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Literary analysis of Edgar Allan Poe's work
The fall of the house of usher short analysis
Literary analysis of Edgar Allan Poe's work
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Madness and Fear in Assignation, Cask of Admontillado, Fall of the House of Usher, and Masque of the Red Death
Poe’s madmen are all obsessed with death. Existence within reality eventually becomes impossible. Poe usually places his madmen within a room or other enclosure, but they are rarely ever outside. When we do come across an exterior, nature does its best to repress, confine and enclose the man. The protagonist in Poe’s “The Assignation” sums up the combination of time and space within Poe’s stories and says, “I have … framed for myself … a bower of dreams. Properties of place, and especially of time, are the bugbears which terrify mankind from the contemplation of the magnificent” (301). The mental state of the character produces the setting and atmosphere, which usually results in the manifestation of that which is feared. The character manipulates his environment and uses tangible buildings and their contents as talismans or charms to outwit death. However, while the madman may try to circumvent death, it is actually the experience of dying that he fears, and despite his best intentions, death comes anyway.
“The Cask of Admontillado” features the madman Montressor who seeks relief from his tormentor, and plans the perfect crime, “to punish with impunity” (274). Montressor painstakingly formulates the plan to rid himself of Fortunato, his tactless and unsuspecting friend. The fact that the crime is detailed meticulously in “Cask” is odd considering the narrator’s obsession with planning the perfect crime and his equal obsession with the absence of detection. Does the anxious tone in the confession-like story indicate that Montressor falls victim to his own perfect crime and awaits execution? In his confession, Mo...
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...sity Press, 1987. 177-214.
Kinkead-Weekes, Mark. “Reflections On, and In ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’” Edgar Allan Poe: The Design of Order. Ed. A Robert Lee. New Jersey: Barnes & Noble Books, 1987. 17-65.
Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Assignation.” The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. Hervey Allen. New York: Parkway Printing Company, 1938. 293-302.
Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Cask of Admontillado.” The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. Hervey Allen. New York: Parkway Printing Company, 1938. 274-79.
Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Fall of the House of Usher.” The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. Hervey Allen. New York: Parkway Printing Company, 1938. 231-45.
Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Masque of the Red Death.” The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. Hervey Allen. New York: Parkway Printing Company, 1938. 269-73.
Poe, Edgar Allan. The Collected Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. New York: The Modern Library 1992
No matter how well executed, a crime of this magnitude will leave scars on the conscience, thus marring it’s perfection. Conflicting psychological emotions and actions plague the journey causing inner conflict ranging between pity and revulsion by the time the narrator concludes. Notwithstanding the shortage of information on Montresor’s life in the ensuing fifty years since Fortunato’s death; it can be surmised from the events leading to the murder that Montresor does, in fact, have a conscience and that it builds upon itself as the action
In The Cask of Amontillado, the theme of revenge is established at the start of the story, when the narrator states that he suffered irreversible insult by his associate, Fortunato, thus he vowed to avenge this action. This is evident in the following statement in the opening paragraph of the story, “The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could; but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge” (Poe 7). Therefore, it is apparent to the reader from the onset of the story that revenge is a major driving force for Montresor for him to dreadfully murder his acquaintance,...
New York: A.C. Armstrong & Son., 1884. xv-xxvi. EPUB file. Sova, Dawn B. "Poe, Edgar Allan.
...scarlet stained windows, the images are “ghastly in the extreme” (Poe 517). Normally, a room would not be decorated in a way that everyone is to frightened to enter. Therefore, the fear of the space mimics man’s fear of death. Poe’s life had been shaped by death and perhaps this influenced his writing. His mother had passed away when he was just three years old. His foster mother also passed away, after a long illness. Then, Poe’s wife passed away from illness. These occurrences in his life may have taught him that time is precious and life is not everlasting. No matter how hard a man tries to ignore death, we will all die eventually. Tragically, Poe himself died under mysterious circumstances just as he was turning his life around and becoming successful. The way Poe set the story and the symbolism used throughout clearly drove home the point that life is fleeting.
Meyers, J. (1992). Edgar Allan Poe: his life and legacy. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons Frank, F. S. (1997). The Poe encyclopedia. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press..
Ingram, John Henry. Edgar Allan Poe: His Life, Letters, and Opinions. New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1965.
In “The Fall of the House of Usher”, Poe’s use of dark, descriptive words allow him to establish an eerie mood. Poe’s unique style of writing along with his foreshadowing vocabulary is significant in creating a suspenseful gothic story. At the beginning of the short story, Poe describes the House of Usher to be “dull”, “oppressive”, and “dreary” (1265). His choice of words strongly emphasizes a mood of darkness and suspense as he builds on the horrific aspects of this daunting tale. At first glimpse, the house itself is surrounded by the feeling of “insufferable gloom”, (1265) “[t]here was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart, an unredeemed dreariness of thought [...]” (1265). The atmosphere that Poe describes in the statement above establishes a spine-chilling mood. Poe uses words such as “insufferable gloom”
Poe, Edgar Allan. Edgar Allan Poe: a collection of stories. New York: Tom Doherty associates, LLC, 1994
Poe, Edgar Allan. Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1966. Print.
As the internal PC networks continued to grow and thrive a need to connect disparate facilities together resulted in development of bridges, gateways and ultimately routers for the sole purpose of connecting LANs to other LAN’s located anywhere from several miles to several thousand miles apart. These devices allow disparate interface types to be connected by performing the necessary modifications to the signal and protocols to allow WAN and LAN equipment to understand one another. Because LAN Ethernet and WAN TDM networks were so vastly different in their technical make-up these intermediary devices were needed to allow inter-communication to occur. While the benefits of enterprise connectivity are great, they come at the cost of special hardware, software and application complexity as the speed of the network can change by a factor of 100 between a client and the server (100 Meg bit per second Ethernet to 1.5 Meg bit per second WAN).
Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Cask of Amontillado.” The Norton Anthology: American Literature. Ed. Wayne Franklin, Philip F. Gurpa, Arnold Krupat. New York: Norton, 2007. 1612-1613, 1616. Print.
Grantz, David. Qrisse's Edgar Allan Poe Pages, The Poe Decoder. 20 April 2001. Web site. 17 November 2013.
Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Fall of the House of Usher.” The American Tradition in Literature. Ed. George Perkins and Barbara Perkins. ___________________: McGraw Hill., 2008. Pg-pg. Print.
Through imagery Poe teaches his readers that they are the ones that determine their life after death. In “The City of Sin” Poe describes the lives of the people who once lived in the city death