Striking Fear In Edgar Allen Poe's Short Stories

Striking Fear in the Hearts of Readers

The main themes in Edgar Allen Poe’s stories are many different forms of fear. He was a writer with an unmatched style, in a good way or bad. The characters in his works are great symbols of this, as they act and speak they can be frightening. How the short stories create suspense is also amazingly terrifying. Some of the scenes he makes with a combination of characters, suspense, and of course his plentiful violent or morbid moments add up for a great mix of menacing, fear-inducing tales. This story is about a narrator and his obsession for a certain eye of an old man. The Tell-Tale Heart story has many ways to make the reader feel fear while reading. Much of the frights come from the characters and

A lot of the scary parts are in the pacing of the story. With the pacing, it starts off sort of slow but there is still that feeling, those kind of staggering moments where it goes a little faster than others. Like when he’s explaining how he is not mad and then says that he killed someone. “Observe how healthily–how calmly I can tell you the whole story” (Poe 303). In the first part, the narrator just sounds like a guy with some kind of disease. He really is not much more than a little odd. As a second part, it gets a little more intense. The narrator begins to show an obsessive side about some “Evil Eye”, He goes wild about it; he even goes into the old man’s room at night just to observe him. It’s really weird to think of why, since he hated it so much, he would continue to go out of his way to see it. Finally, in the third part of the story, it gets really freaky. There is a clear look at how inane the narrator really and definitely is when he kills the man and hides his body parts under the floorboards. He explains that he is not mad because of how nicely he has disposed of it, bit it is still painfully obvious for everyone that this man really is not right. Even after he is done with the murder he does not show any signs of remorse towards the old man even though he has not done anything to the narrator. A reader might think at least he would regret killing him a little bit since it is assumable they had some kind of acquaintanceship going on. A second way the story uses suspense to frighten its readers is by using a lot of foreshadowing. The man’s death is already known b the reader so it adds some fear wondering how he is going to die, which is very suspenseful. It is certain that it is going to happen but just do not know when, all that is known is that there is going to be a big lead up to it. The narrator tells us about all the