Edgar Allan Poe Corruption

In the early to mid 1800s, there lived a man who experienced copious amounts of unfortunate events. His parents dying before he was three years old, his being separated from his remaining family at a young age, and his wife dying at the age of 25 from Tuberculosis, Edgar Allan Poe had endured many hardships which he later used as inspiration in his works (Poets). In his tales, it is obvious he uses his own feelings of loneliness and anguish to make the reader experience a sense of his own depression as they are reading. Edgar Allan Poe, with the adoption of labyrinthine word choice and the motifs of death and decay, develops truly ominous tones in his prose and poetry.

Poe manages to create entire stories with words of dark and horrific

Poe utilizes these motifs in The Tell-Tale Heart, The Cask of Amontillado, Ligea, and the majority of his other works through the death or mourning of his characters. In the short story The Cask of Amontillado, the narrator, Montresor, opens with, “THE thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge.” Right off the bat, Montresor is vowing to kill his good friend based on an unforgivable insult (Smith). In the end, Poe writes, “My heart grew sick; it was the dampness of the catacombs that made it so. I hastened to make an end of my labour. I forced the last stone into its position; I plastered it up” (The Cask of Amontillado). Although he quickly dismisses it by blaming it on the dampness of the catacombs, Montresor feels a pang of guilt for killing his friend, but he finishes the job before he has any more second thoughts (Smith). In The Tell-Tale Heart, Poe writes about a mentally unstable caretaker who is deeply troubled by a man’s “Evil Eye.” The theme of death comes into play when the caretaker decides the only way he can solve the problem is to kill the elderly man. Poe writes, “He shrieked once --once only. In an instant I dragged him to the floor, and pulled the heavy bed over him. I then smiled gaily, to find the deed so far done” (The Tell Tale Heart). With the use of the theme of death, Poe was able to create a scene that was not