Edgar Allan Poe
A majority of the stories we read today have a great effect on our minds, but what strategy do these authors use to hold their readers attention? One word: suspense; suspense is a type of writing technique authors will use to get their readers to feel uncertainty about the conclusion and makes the story become interesting, so that the readers are left wondering and wanting more.
Edgar Allan Poe, an important American writer and poet, during the Dark Romanticism period, is credited with producing many tales of mystery and terror. Poe’s first collection of short stories Tales of Grotesque and Arabesque was published in 1839. His imaginative writings within several different modes of discourse show how Poe both followed yet departed from a variety of literary and genres. In Edgar Allan Poe, Richard Wilbur writes how he thinks Poe’s work “has an accessible allegorical meaning”. He goes on saying how most people will not agree with him and how “Some critics, in fact, have refused to see any substance, allegorical or otherwise, in Poe’s fiction, and have regarded his tales as nothing more than complicated machines for saying ‘boo’” or how his work is only intelligible “to monsters”. Wilbur then continues on how Poe’s criticism “assures us that his work does,” indeed “have meaning” (Bloom 52). As well as Poe being best known for his tales of mystery and horror, and he is to be considered “responsible for the birth of the short story as a literary form” (May xi) and the inventor of modern detective fiction genre.
Instead of defining each character with great amount of details, Poe creates figures larger than life. According to Poe, he did not have to “paint his characters fully” because “unveiling of character is the function” (Buranelli 72) of his stories. In his writings, the protagonists are haunted isolated individuals. These estranged characters of Poe’s tales are lonely protagonists set against unknowable, dark fates. In his tales, we never see these gloomy characters work or socialize, but instead see them buried in dark mouldering castles with bizarre rugs and “dark draperies hung upon the walls” (Poe ).
The genre of Poe’s works, plot structure, narration, word choice, imagery, and other writing strategies help create and raise the effect of suspense and horror. Some of Poe’s works such as “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Black Cat” are vivid examples of Poe’s effective horror technique. For the most part, Poe uses settings in these works to create an atmosphere. For example in the “The Fall of the House of Usher”, the cracks in the house and the dead trees suggest that the house and its surroundings are not sturdy or reassuring. Along with the thunder, strange light, and mist, all these elements create an unsettling feeling for the reader.
A short story gives enough space to intrigue the readers, to stir up their interest in the plot. In Poe’s short stories, readers begin to feel nervous and alarmed, sensing some dark mystery is to be uncovered. Therefore, terrified with a gloomy atmosphere of Roderick’s castle and feeling of trouble, the reader gets immensely horrified at the sight of Roderick’s dead sister Madeline suddenly revived to life. In “The Fall of the House of Usher”, the color black provides the atmosphere outside and inside as a ghastly and mystic feeling.
When the story opens, we are faced with a gloomy atmosphere. When the narrator’s eyes fall upon the House of Usher he says, “A sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit” (Poe 177) and he “is unsettled, shocked, and taken aback by his surroundings (Short Stories for Students, “The Fall of the House of Usher” 55). Here, Poe succeeds in creating a sense of fear and suspense in our minds. Poe as well paints his dark and gloomy setting with colors: black, grey, white and red. Poe observes strongly on how each color is used. Aside from the red blood on the clothes of Usher’s sister during her final appearance, the text remains on dead whites, blacks, and greys, which all symbolize the lack of life and health: “a few white trunks of decayed trees” (Poe 177).
Along with these gloomy settings created, Poe uses imagery as well to build “a foreboding atmosphere and to advance his themes in the story” (Short Stories for Students, “The Fall of the House of Usher 56). For example, “The Fall of the House of Usher”, Poe seemed to create the story with an atmosphere of evil. The atmosphere of terror in this story is heightened due to the idea of Madeline’s character. It is suggested that because of Madeline’s illness, it makes her “complexions [look] cadaverous” (Magistrale 63) that to some critics, they believe she is to be a vampire looking to drain the life out of Roderick. Others have come up with the the theory “that the narrator himself is evil and the he along with Roderick,