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Fear In Poe's Poetry

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How Can Fear Change the Outcome of Our Lives?
Fear can be beneficial and unhealthy, it just depends on how people handle it. Fear can keep people from doing horrendous things; however, being exposed to such fear can cause someone to become so paranoid they cannot enjoy life. For example, Edgar Allan Poe writes stories like “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” and “The Masque of Red Death” to show the different ways to handle fear. All of the main characters in Poe’s stories are exposed to fear and handle it differently. In the texts by Edgar Allan Poe, the symbols, irony, and imagery all display how fear distorts the narrator's mind and the results of that fear.

Poe uses symbolism to represent how fear can distort the mind and the results of such fear. For example, in the “Tell-Tale Heart,” the narrator obsesses over the eye to show how fear can distort the mind: “It was open-wide, wide open- and I grew furious as I gazed upon it” (76). This symbol represents the old man judging the narrator, which the narrator fears. Afraid, the narrator starts to obsess over his actions because of his fear that the eye will keep criticizing him. Consequently, the narrator becomes so paranoid …show more content…

The narrator describes the pit in “The Pit and the Pendulum” as “In the centre yawned the circular pit from whose jaws I had escaped; but it was the only one in the dungeon” (67). The narrator describes the pit as having jaws, and the image that readers picture is that the pit was swallowing the narrator if he was not saved. The narrator feels alarmed when he realizes what torture he has to encounter. However, instead of becoming paranoid about it, he overcame his fear by being optimistic and using his wits. The narrator shows the example of how fear does not distort people’s minds if they use logic and hope to conquer their

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Compare And Contrast Tell Tale Heart And Minister's Black Veil

976 Words | 4 Pages

Throughout “Tell Tale Heart” and “Ministers Black Veil”, both Poe and Hawthorne use symbolism to show they cannot hide from their sins. To show Poe cannot hide from his sins, he uses the old man's eye as a symbol. The reason the eye creates this symbolism, is because although it has a blue, hughey film over it, he cannot stop seeing it. Every night when Poe opens the old man's door, the light shines upon the vulture eye, which always seems to be open. The pale blue film, also demonstrates Poes inability to see clearly; in this case representing Poe trying not to acknowledge his own sins.

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Fear In Poe's The Masque Of The Red Death

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“The Masque of the Red Death” displays the gothic element of a character 's motivation caused by fear. Prince Prospero insured his and his guests’ safety with “The courtiers, having entered, brought furnaces and massy hammers and welded the bolts” (Poe 430). In order to protect himself and the guests from the contagion he had the doors of the abbey sealed shut. The fear of getting the contagion caused Prince Prospero to seal himself in the abbey. Prince Prospero’s fear is not only shown towards the contagion, but towards the masked figure.

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Comparing Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart And Masque Of Red Death

844 Words | 4 Pages

Poe uses symbolism a lot in his stories to make his writing have a more eerie feeling. ”The Tell-Tale Heart” and “Masque of Red Death” both have symbols that induce fear into the main characters hearts. In The Tell-Tale Heart Poe writes “...for it was no the old man who vexed me but his evil eye “(75).The narrator kills an innocent old man for that hr thought the old man's eyes were judging. Although the old man just had cataracts ,the narrator could not stand the man for his eye he compared looked as vulture's eye. The narrator was afraid of this old man and his “evil eye”.

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Suspense In The Pit And The Pendulum

412 Words | 2 Pages

In “The Pit and the Pendulum”, the author manages to incorporate suspense into several parts of this story. One example is where it states, “I was sick—sick unto death with that long agony; and when they at length unbound me, and I was permitted to sit, I felt that my senses were leaving me. The sentence—the dread sentence of death—was the last of distinct accentuation which reached my ears. After that, the sound of the inquisitorial voices seemed merged in one dreamy indeterminate hum.” This shows how the author created suspense by not telling the reader about why the narrator was receiving a death sentence.

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Irony In The Masque Of Red Death

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In the end Poe’s writing represents fear and how it can distort your thoughts and make you take a turn for the worst. Or in some cases, usually more rarely, the better, as in “The Pit and the

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Edgar Allan Poe Literary Devices

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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

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1590 Words | 7 Pages

The scary tone has a trend through all of his stories which makes the reader more engaged. In “The Tell Tale Heart” Poe talks about death and how an eye viewed as, “an evil eye” could cause someone to kill. It took some time, but Poe lead the whole story up to the gruesome murder scene. “First of all I dismembered the corpse. I cut off the head and the arms and then the legs.

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The Use Of Fear In Edgar Allen Poe's Stories

1822 Words | 8 Pages

One of Edgar Allan Poe’s most known attributes is his use of fear in many of his stories. He used words and images to instill the fright into his readers. He strung together scenarios that happen to his characters that encapsulates real fears that a reader could have. Poe would use fear in his stories in multiple ways. A story could relate around a certain fear.

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1395 Words | 6 Pages

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