Literary Elements In Edgar Allen Poe's The Angel Of Odd

Edgar Allen Poe was a well-known American author, born on January 19, 1809, who wrote the story “The Angel of Odd” (Merriam Webster 1). Poe has always been a popular writer who writes poems, short stories, and novellas with “an aesthetic of obscureism” (Garrison Jr. 1). “The Angel of Odd” is a short story about a man who believes that all the odd occurrences and odd deaths that he sees in the paper are simply made up. The man is later visited by the Angel of Odd who shows him that odd things can happen with bad luck. The main literary devices that this story demonstrates are irony, symbolism, and suspense. One type of literary device used in “The Angel of Odd” is irony. The story begins with the narrator reading the paper and he sees a story about how someone died in an unusual and odd way. He gets angry and concludes that things like

At the beginning of the story, the narrator has a lot of wine before he takes a nap. While he is napping the Angel of Odd comes to him. The angel is described as, “His body was a wine-pipe …In its nether extremity were inserted two kegs, which seemed to answer all the purposes of legs. For arms there dangled from the upper portion of the carcass two tolerably long bottles, with the necks outward for hands. All the head that I saw the monster possessed of was one of those Hessian canteens.” (Poe 2). The Angel of Odd is portrayed this way to symbolize that our narrator is drunk. Another example of suspense found in the story is how the Angel of Odd talks. The narrator describes the Angel of Odd as having a thick accent, but it is almost like the angel is drink to because his words seem to be slurred. The last example of symbolism is the curse of bad luck that the angel puts on the narrator. The curse is an example of symbolism because some believe that the angel can represent alcohol, so the story is showing how alcohol can ruin your