The Use Of Fear In Edgar Allen Poe's Stories

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. The way Poe sets up his story with the tension could create a fearful atmosphere. He did not just focus on portraying a narrator with a certain fear, he would use language that would make the reader feel fear. He packed in images of darkness and horror in order to create these atmospheres that presented fear in many different ways. Poe being known as a master of the horror

Whether it’s guilt overriding their senses, killing someone because of a fear, the fear of being buried alive, the fear of disease, fear of the dead, fear of dying. In “Cask of Amontillado” (1846), Poe plays on the fear of being entombed. He projects these fears onto the reader. He uses dark language to project a horrific setting, such as putting an emphasis on the catacomb—how dark and decrepit it is: “We descended, passed on, and descending again, arrive in the deep crypt, in which the foulness of the air caused our flambeaux rather to glow than flame” (21). The walls “had been lined with human remains” just like the Catacombs in Paris. (22) Poe creates a damp, dark, and terrifying setting. Before the climax, it’s easy to see the narrator is up to something nefarious. Poe meticulously describes Montresor burying Fortunato alive in the tomb: how he layers the tiers, and the “succession of loud and shrill screams” that come from Fortunato. (23) Even the obvious panic that Fortunato exhibits where he believes it’s all a joke: “Ha! Ha! Ha!—he! he!—a very good joke indeed—an excellent jest. We will have many a rich laugh about it” (23). Yet, unfortunately for Fortunato, it is not a joke at all. Poe ups the fear by bringing these images of this man being entombed alive and the fact that he is virtually unable to do anything about it. And all for some unknown reason, since Montresor never admits as

Poe starts of right away setting a sinister tone with the description of the “manor of gloom,” with its “bleak walls,” “vacant eye-like windows,” “rank sedges,” “decayed tress” and sense of the “utter depression of soul” (25). Poe brings fright through Roderick Usher, instead of his unnamed narrator. Roderick is being crippled by fear, due to presumably his own psyche: his “nervous agitation” with a “mental disorder which suppressed him” (25). The narrator has an odd feeling from the “peculiar” atmosphere. (27) This sets the reader up to know that something is off. The manor is beginning to fall apart just like Roderick’s sanity. Poe plays up the tension towards the end of the story, presenting the fear as it comes to a head. Madeline, Roderick’s twin sister, is entombed by her brother and the narrator after they believe her dead. She’s put in another tomb by Roderick’s insistence before arrangements to be given a proper burial. (36) As Roderick grows more hysterical towards the end of the story, the narrator reads “The Mad Trist” to him. Poe uses the story within the story to heighten fear as the manor begins to mimic what is happening in the tale: “there’s an “echo of the very crackling and ripping sound which Sir Lancelot had so particularly described,” a “low…unusual screaming and grating sound,” and a “hollow, metallic, and clangorous…reverberation” (40-41). This all