How Does Poe Create Suspense

Landon Behnen
Mr. Arthurs
Honors English 10
7 February 2023
Poe and his gothic elements Edgar Allen Poe, famous author of short stories, “The Black Cat” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” often utilized a great deal of Gothic elements throughout his stories. Poe’s reasons for Gothic elements' utilization are due to his rough childhood and the death of his mother while he was a young boy. His use of Gothic elements builds the plot and makes the readers feel a certain way such as reading his stories. For example, he uses Gothic elements like entrapment and grotesque. In “The Black Cat” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” Poe utilizes entrapment and grotesque to create mystery and suspense; however, it is most successful in “The Black

Furthermore, Poe uses entrapment of characters to make the reader just feel flat out scared, along with creating the atmosphere of mystery and suspense. Throughout “The Black Cat” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” Poe uses entrapment multiple times to repetitively create suspense and mystery. In “The Black Cat” Poe uses entrapment many times but specifically when regarding his wife. Near the end of “The Black Cat” we see the narrator kill his wife and become “determined to wall [her] up in the cellar” (Poe 4). The use of entrapment regarding burying his dead wife really builds the atmosphere of suspense by leaving us thinking if he will ever get caught. Although Poe uses the Gothic element entrapment in “The Black Cat” he also uses it in “The Fall of the House of Usher”. Entrapment is seen in “The Fall of the House of Usher” when Roderick Usher buries his sister Madeline. Roderick Usher decides to put “her corpse for a fortnight in one of the numerous vaults” (Poe 16).This creates the mood of mystery because many readers of Poe know that he tends to bury characters alive so subconsciously most readers will be wondering if Madeline was even dead. While Poe uses entrapment in both stories he also uses the Gothic element grotesque to make the reader feel an atmosphere of mystery and

Poe uses grotesque in many different ways to build suspense and mystery. Another way Poe builds the mystery and suspense in “The Black Cat” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” is through the use of the Gothic element grotesque. In both stories Poe describes rooms or areas as grotesque to build suspense and or mystery. The narrator in “The Black Cat” puts his wife behind the wall “which the dampness of the atmosphere had prevented from hardening” (Poe 4). Poe talks about the dampness of the area behind the wall to make readers feel kind of eerie or just grossed out by it. While Poe uses grotesque to build the suspense and mystery in “The Black Cat” he also uses it in “The Fall of the House of Usher”. The reader sees Poe use the element grotesque in “The Fall of the House of Usher” in a similar way as “The Black Cat” and that is by describing how a room or area is like. When Roderick Usher is burying his sister he puts her in a vault that is “small,damp, and entirely without means of admission for light” (Poe