Edgar Allan Poe Alcoholism

Everyone dies eventually, but what matters is how death affects someone. Each person handles death differently, some by moving past the lost and others by turning to drugs or alcohol for relief. Edgar Allan Poe fell victim to the latter; in his life, many people he was close with died while he was young, but that made him who he was. With the death of his parents, his severe poverty, and the illness of his wife, Poe faced many challenges that only exacerbated his alcohol addiction. Because of the impacts of this on his writing, Poe is considered one of the darkest authors to ever live. It’s been said that he founded the gothic genre and paved the way for many horror writers to come. Poe’s style is verbose and grim due to the various losses

For example, in “The Black Cat”, the narrator, a middle aged married man, acts irrationally and reflects Poe’s alcoholism. The fact that the narrator admits his “disease” corroborates that he is unreliable due to his drinking. This is also seen in how the narrator is numb to his emotions. While he’s initially apathetic towards the idea of harming the cat, once he murders it he feels relieved, not remorseful or sad, but comforted by its death. Likewise, when he kills his wife he feels satisfied and “accomplished”. This element of unreliability is also seen in “The Tell-Tale Heart”. The narrator, who eventually murders his friend, is clearly unreliable because he is paranoid about ordinary things, such as the eye of his friend and claims he is able to hear the heart of his dead friend beating. His paranoia over the eye shows his unreliability in that there is no pragmatic reason behind it, yet it drives him to do something extreme such as murdering his friend. Likewise, when the narrator declares that he can hear “the beating of [his dead friend’s] heart”, it further proves his fallibility (Poe “The Tell-Tale”). The fact that he thinks he is able to hear a sound that’s not there corroborates that he is not in a logical or rational state of mind while conveying his story. In “Pit and the Pendulum”, a story about a man held in a torture chamber, the narrator is continuously suffering; after being held in an unknown location for days with long periods of unconsciousness and various physical challenges, his suffering is both internal and external. This idea is reinforced through a statement by Jennifer Ballengee, an English professor, that the narrator is clearly unreliable because of the fact that he is “isolated within his dungeon chamber [and] undergoes horrifying bodily discomfort and pain that simultaneously suggest[s] and