Comparing Death And Loneliness In Tell-Tale Heart And Masque Of The Red
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Connections of Poe’s Short Stories
The tone of death and loneliness are a few of the settings incorporated into Edgar Allen Poe’s short stories. In the stories The “Tell-Tale Heart” and the “Masque of the Red Death” uses irony in two different ways in both of the tales. Edgar Allen Poe was able to bring the dark and mysterious stories into America, and the first to begin the era of goth stories.
Edgar Allen Poe’s style of dark writings would seem to be a result of the tragedies and hardships he encountered throughout his whole life. Edgar was born in Boston January 19, 1809. In 1810, his father abandoned the family. In 1811, his mother died of consumption, also known as tuberculosis, Poe was then sent to an orphanage. Little did he know,…show more content… The narrator says: “I knew the sound well. Many a night, just at midnight, when all the world slept, it has welled up from my bosom, deepening, with its echo, the terrors that distracted me. I say I knew it well. I know what the old man felt....” The narrator knows such fearful restlessness first hand: “He was still sitting up in the bed, listening;—just as I have done, night after night, hearkening to the death watches in the wall.” Thus the narrator and the old man are on such equal footing that they seem almost like the same person (Chua). The way That Poe did this goes to show about the character’s obsession. Throughout the story the narrator is obsessed with time. The central image of the beating of the heart he associates with the ticking of a clock; he says the old man listens, just as he has done, to the death watches (a kind of beetle that makes a ticking sound) in the wall; he emphasizes how time slows down and almost stops as he sticks his head into the old man's room. The meaning of time for the narrator is suggested by the title, for the tale that every heart tells is the tale of time—time inevitably passing, with every beat of the heart bringing one closer to death (Bloom). He says that he loves the old man, has no hatred at all toward him, does not want his money, has not been…show more content… The Red Death represents both literally and metaphorically death. The Masque of the Red Death is a tale about another being, and that is passing . To underscore the fact that his own art must fail just as Prospero's does, Poe sabotages "Red Death" by means of its impossible narrator. We recognize that we cannot successfully imitate the narrator's trick, for unlike him we are flesh and blood: time and death will not pause to see whether we remember their inevitability. The narrator is thus a fly in the soothing ointment of aesthetic distance, figuring and ridiculing both the author's and the reader's hope of escape into art (Slick). The Red Death speaks to a person both actually and metaphorically. The figure who appears at the masquerade as the Red Death represents the outside of the tale. He appears at an end; individual maskers first become aware of him just "before the last echoes of the last chime" of midnight have "utterly sunk into silence."At the climax of the tale, the intruder retreats backwards through each of the seven rooms followed by Prospero and, at a further remove, the other inhabitants of the abbey. In the last room, his corpse-like mask is violently removed and the company gasp "in unutterable horror" at finding nothing within, nothing beneath--the clothing and mask are "untenanted by any tangible form” (Bloom). He is outside the bounds, both spatially and psychologically