Edgar Allan Poe's Obsession Of Horror

Edgar Allan Poe is known in America is the William Shakespeare of the lunatic asylum, which is distinguished by Tony Magistrate in his article “Poe, Edgar Allan 1809-1849” (8). Poe illustrates his characters with unstable minds and the inability to maintain self-control over their darkest urges. His stories are told in the first person by male narrators that make even the hesitant readers thrust into a crazed obsession of the horror stories (Magistrate 8). Poe used supernatural themes to address and to discover social anxieties concerning madness, disease, and death in a psychological version of Gothic literature. According to J. Gerald Kennedy in his book Phantasms of Death in Poe’s Fiction, Poe thought about death and the human soul more than the average person might (128). His writing highlights the psychological

Human nature portrays light and dark; however, in Poe’s stories the dark side surfaces. According to Robert L. Carringer in his book Poe’s Tales: The Circumscription of Space, Poe’s protagonist’s show numerous forms of downfall like deteriorating or taint (18). His protagonists can never improve because they cannot observe their own failures of understanding, but only maintaining their obsessive madness. Thus represents the clinical regard of mental exhilaration in forms of terror, which stimulates the idea of death (18). Poe's obsession with the characters' state of mind relates to his own neurotic personality. If Poe's protagonist displays a nervousness of enclosures, then it is labeled as claustrophobia (21).There will always be a label for certain illnesses, but sometimes the label one gets could not be the true reason. Space itself is not the reason, but the unknown possibilities that prowl at the point where space alone can end (21). It is the imagination that can play with one’s mind to make them think of endless possibilities of something that could go wrong. This leads to Poe being drawn to the cult of the deceased by his