Edgar Allan Poe Literary Devices

Edgar Allan Poe’s use of literary devices to show the how fear of the characters in his stories are both helpful and harmful to them. Poe shows how the fears and obsessions of the narrators in his tales either lead to their inevitable death, or their miraculous survival. Edgar Allan Poe uses many literary devices in his texts, such as symbols, ironies, and figurative language, to show the strange and distorted ways of the characters, and the repercussion of their fears and obsessions. In Poe’s stories, a literary device he uses frequently throughout his stories, are symbols. For example, in the text “The The-Tale Heart”, Poe’s use of the old man’s eye symbolized the obsessions and fears of the narrator like, “Whenever it fell upon me, my blood

Irony takes place in all of Poe’s stories, and it is very easy to notice what the most ironic parts are in all of the texts too. However, “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Masque of the Red Death”, have the most ironic sequences in them. In “The Tell-Tale Heart”, the narrator is so confident that he had thought of everything, that he had the perfect plan, but he hadn’t planned for the guilt that would later haunt him after he killed the old man. He ended up confessing his crime to the police and even tearing up the floorboards where he had stashed the old man’s remains. For example, “I admit the deed! --tear up the planks!-- here, here!--it is the beating of his hideous heart!(78)”. Secondly, in “The Masque of Red Death”, it’s ironic that after all of the Prince’s efforts to keep evil and death out, it was already inside : “And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death...And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all” (61). Before the quote, the Red Death led Prince Prospero through his six chambers in his castle, and in the last one they reached, the Prince pulled a dagger on the Death, only to fall to death, and so did the rest of the world. In both quotes given, the irony is, guilt came as a repercussion to your actions, and you can’t avoid death, it is

In “The Pit and the Pendulum” and “The Tell-Tale Heart”, Poe uses varieties of figurative language, like similes and hyperbole. Furthermore, in “The Tell-Tale Heart”, the narrator uses his “acute hearing” as a sense of hyperbole. For instance, ”But the beating grew louder, louder! I thought the heart must burst(76)”. The narrator makes it out to seem like he has some sort of super hearing where he can hear the actual heartbeat of the old man. Secondly, in “The Pit and the Pendulum”, the narrator compares his sleep, to that of death, and gives the Pit human characteristics. As an example,Poe writes, “A deep sleep fell upon me-- a sleep like that of death(67)”. In the quote, the narrator describes his sleep as being so deep, that it could be compared to death it self. Maybe it could have been a bit of foreshadowing to his own death, or that of the inquisitors who held him