Edgar Allen Poes Style

Edgar Allen Poe has a very distinguishable style and does things his own way. Poe is known primarily for his mastery of the Gothic genre, and his works of horror. The style of a piece of literature is the result of a successful blending of form with content. When applied to literature the style suggests objective presentation, formal structure, and clear language, it is the way a story is written. Poe takes his style to an extreme. He writes his stories to be very depressing and dark. They are very graphic and very much vivid in details. Edgar Allen Poe uses his own life and his experiences to create the story that he does. His short stories are dark, gloomy, and full of terror. There is a lot of torture, death, and superstition. His pieces of literature were all made to bring about fear into the mind of the reader. His life wasn’t a normal life. He didn’t have much of a childhood and was sick with a disease. His early life factors help to make his horrifying works much more understandable. He was a crazy, scary, dark man. His writing style was very mysterious. Poe’s work has a way of making us scared. He does this through his use of setting and narrative style. In many of Poe's works, setting is used to paint a dark and gloomy picture in our minds. Poe did this deliberately so that the reader can make a connection between darkness and death. He used a wide range of details to explain to us exactly what and where everything takes place. He uses enough details that you are able to paint a clear picture in your head of what is going on. In The Fall of the House of Usher, the characteristics of the setting are important. The images he gives us such as how both the Usher family and the Usher mansion are crumbling from the inside waiting to collapse. It helps us to connect the background with the story. ‘Although no portion of the masonry had fallen...there appeared to be a wild inconsistency between its still perfect adaptation of parts, and the crumbling condition of the individual stones...The eye of a scrutinizing observer might have noticed a barely perceptible fissure, which, extending from the roof of the building in front, made its way down the wall in a zigzag direction, until it became lost in the sullen waters of the tarn"(………). With that being is said about the setting of the story we can tell that the houses is also used as a symbol. The crack that runs down the center of the house explores the inner workings of the human brain and foreshadows the events to come. It is a symbol of the split personalities that the owner has. It also is an example of how just as the house is crumbling so it the family of the Ushers. The Usher mansion appears vacant and barren. The same is true for the narrator. As we picture in our minds the extreme decay and decomposition, we can feel as though the life around it is also crumbling He uses the element of symbolism in a lot of his work. He uses it to show madness and mental death. Another element that makes Edgar Allen Poe’s style unique is his use of foreshadowing. In his story “The Black Cat” this is easily seen. He starts this story off when he is in jail waiting the next day for his execution for killing his wife. The rest of the story is told as a flashback of the event of his life that lead up to his position that he was