Edgar Allan Poe, was no doubt, a master of Gothic fiction. Prior to Poe, writers including Horace Walpole had found success in publishing horror based stories. However, it was Poe who elevated the horror genre to the next level by focusing on the psychology of terror through first-person narration, repetition, and torture. In Poe’s works, he revealed people’s horror towards supernatural, death, evil and disintegration of personality. He tried to demonstrate that horror can originate from our soul. Poe explored the psychology of terror through first-person narration, rather than just the dark-and-spooky setting of it. In many of his stories, Poe uses his main character as a first-person narrator to heighten suspense and draws an audience into the character’s situation. One of Poe’s most masterful uses of first-person narration in a horror story is the narrator in “The Tell Tale Heart.”As the story progresses, the reader witnesses the narrator’s mind unravel as it is wracked with paranoia“I talked still faster and louder. And the sound, too, became louder … Louder it became, and louder. Why did the men not go? Louder, louder.” The use of psychological character buildup in Poe’s short stories is a key feature which makes his writing lightyears ahead of its time, …show more content…
The story expressed the depiction of a slow, torture infused death through the hanging of the cat in “The Black Cat.” Poe Expresses the death of his cat in the following quote“ One morning, in cool blood, I slipped a noose about its neck and hung it to the limb of a tree; — Hung it with the tears streaming from my eyes, and with the bitterest remorse at my heart; — hung it because I knew that it had loved me.” The use of terror, furthermore, exemplifies the vision of horror in short stories which helped the authors of the future when expressing the pain of a