The eerie mood apparent in Poe’s writing is conveyed by his use of unsettling imagery and suspenseful syntax. Poe’s life began on January 1, 1809. As a child, Poe’s father left his family and his mother passed away. He was orphaned at a young age and was taken in by the Allan family. His life was plagued with poverty and alcoholism.
The imagery in the piece can also materialize the thoughts of the reader to see how the characters are beginning down a slippery-slope toward nothingness. In the short story, The Tell Tale Heart, Poe was able to describe the insanity of the narrator about the single eye. The
Poe uses imagery to explain the atmosphere of fear and the continuous breaking of Usher. Poe portrays the surroundings of the narrator as dark, giving an image of the setting “During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year” (Poe 310). The image of a dark day is installed in the reader by this line. This line also gives the reader the image of being alone on a dark day in the autumn. Poe also uses imagery to make his readers a sense of fear “I know not how it was--but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit” (Poe 310).
Edgar Allen Poe, the author of the “The Tell-Tale Heart” and the “Black Cat”, creates a frightening mood using, narrator actions, character details, and the setting. The “Tell-Tale Heart” is a short story that is about a man that states he’s not crazy but goes to an Old man 's house every night to watch him sleep waiting for the right time to kill him. This man doesn’t give up until he gets what he wants which is the Old man to be dead which he accomplishes but gets caught, for his crazy murder. The “Black Cat”, another story by Edgar Allen Poe, Is about a man who has a cat named Pluto, but once he got home drunk he was angry and cut an eye of his cat and killed Pluto. Later on, this man finds a new cat and tries to kill it but his wife gets in the way and he kills her by accident, he tries hiding the bodies but also gets caught.
There are times in life where people do commit a small mistake, or a huge crime, but what really matters is if one will listen to their conscience. In “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe, the main character lives with an old man who has an eye that “resembled that of a vulture--a pale blue eye, with a film over it.” The story revolves around the main character’s obsession over the eye, and how he got rid of it-- by murdering the old man. Towards the end of the story, the young man confesses to the police about his insane stunt after they searched his house. In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Edgar Allan Poe focused on having the reader know more than the secondary character, using description, and using a first-person narrator, to build suspense. Edgar Allan Poe made sure the reader knew more than the secondary character in his short story to build suspense.
Through Poe’s short stories and poems, Edgar Allan Poe visual and metaphorical imagery to illustrate the theme of revenge and death. In the short story, The Cask of Amontillado, Poe uses strong descriptive adjectives and physical descriptions to convey imagery. “The wine sparkled in his eyes and the bells jingled. My own fancy grew warm with the Medoc. We had passed through walls of piled bones, with casks and puncheons intermingling, into the inmost recesses of the catacombs.” (Poe, paragraph 50).
By Poe using these it changes and municipalities the readers view of the story and what going on. In the short story Tell-Tale Heart the narrator goes through his process of killing a man in his room. After he does it he start to panic as officers come to his house. “ Was it possible they heard not? Almighty God!
The overall mood determined by the text, darkness and madness, was influenced by several elements to help further advance it. Hence, Edgar Allan Poe focused on multiple craft moves, 1st person narrator, symbolism, and description to build a variety of moods. Right from the start, the author uses the craft move, 1st person narrator, to build an overall mood of darkness and mischievousness. In the text the narrator utters, “True!-nervous-very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses-not destroyed-not dulled them.” This quote has an immediate effect on the readers, as it uses the em dash.
“Why will you say that I am mad?” In the short story, “Tell-Tale Heart” Edgar Allan Poe describes a man who murdered an old man. The main character describes himself as an acute killer who is not mad even though he has a disease. He claims that the reason why he murdered the old man was because of his “eye like a vulture”. The main character takes serious precaution and dissimulation. After what precedent, he went to the old man’s house everyday for a week just as midnight.
Edgar Allan Poe uses art in “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Haunted Palace” to create an emotion-filled setting changing readers perceptions and illustrates imagery of the decline from happiness to sadness. Art in “The Fall of the House of Usher” is structured to create a mysterious atmosphere at the beginning of the passage to carry through the rest of the short story. The author uses the description of the setting to trigger emotions for the reader by using an eerie landscape surrounded by darkness. Specifically, the short story conjures a sense or fear for the reader as depicted when the narrator describes the setting, “There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart- an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the subline” (Poe 160). His description of the setting is used to create a picture in the reader minds of not only what his eyes are seeing, but also what his emotions are as he arrives at The House of Usher.