Frankenstein Night Setting

Edgar Allan Poe seemed to have a more depressing life then Frankenstein, and he used his difficult life and many literary devices to shape how his stories had an impact on the reader. Just one of these devices is when he uses the setting to get the feeling and the mood across to the reader. This is the most effective tool that Poe uses in his literature. For example in “The Tell Tale Heart” Poe uses the night setting show secrecy and not wanting to be seen coming as well as the city which makes the narrator confess in the end, in “The Cask of Amontillado” he uses the catacomb and the closed off walls to foreshadow the death of Fortunato; finally in “The Masque of the Red Death” he uses the apocalyptic wasteland to give the feeling of abandoned

This time in a “The Cast of Amontillado” he sets the story in a catacomb. The main character, Montressor, describes it to the reader: “Its walls had been lined with human remains, piled to the vault overhead, in the fashion of the great catacombs of Paris” (Poe 67). By setting up the story in the prime location it allows him to use foreshadowing and irony with just the setting. All of the human remains were used as a symbol to foreshadow Fortunato’s fate being prevalent in all the bones lining the walls. As well as the irony of not only Fortuanto’s name but also how it seemed that the entire way down Fortunato didn’t even notice the bones on the walls, which doubled in effect given he is going to be spending the rest of his life surrounded by them. Towards the end of the story Montressor describes to the reader how he locked up Fortunato: “Against the new masonry I re-erected the old rampart of bones. For the half of a century no mortal has disturbed them.”(Poe 88). When the Montressor describes how he left Fortuanto by himself to rot, and how he changed the setting in a way so no one would ever find Fortuanto, Poe is able to convey to the reader how much Montressor hated Fortuanto. When he says no mortal has disturbed them he seems to have a sense of being proud that what he had constructed was so prefect and strong that no one noticed that it was created at a much later date. The massive gap in the time period also seems to show that the setting is much bigger then just the catacombs. It shows that Montressor is recollecting on this from 50 years in the future or even telling it to someone else. Either way Edgar Allan Poe uses the setting to get a mood across as well as change of the way the story is