Please help, I need to do a paper on Berenice, and I have read the story twice but still cant figure out the rising action, climax and Denouement of the story. please help THAnks

-- Anonymous, November 12, 2001

Answers

This particular style involves the narrator presenting his ideas and psychology then gradually introducing- reluctantly- berneice whom he attempts to dismiss as an admired abstraction that he regretted getting engaged to. As she slowly succumbs to a wasting epilepsy, her teeth become corpselike prominent and a mad obsession to the narrator.

When she becomes cataleptic and is buried he too enters a fuge like state finsihing the wedding of obsession to Berneice and her fate. This is finsihed by the climax of his awaking to find HE has awoken and rescued berenice- unhappily in a trance where he pulled all her teeth to treasure in a box he spills grotesquely onto the floor in a rapid denbouement of discovery, irony and horror.

Some Poe stories carry the denouement further others like this(The Pit and the Pendulum, Mask of the Red Death) the curtain comes crashing down. In others to which this also similar because of the dual fugues of Berenice and the narrator, there is a double climax, the old Friday the Thirteenth movie two-step as in The Tell-Tale Heart. In some stories too the narrator does not take so much time explaining his extraordinary ideas and perceptions. In those cases, the reader is usually familiar with the Poe hero or the narrator is toned down and more balanced.

-- Anonymous, November 13, 2001

Also at www.eapoe.org Poe's letter to White, April 1835 is enlightening as to Poe's ideas and defense of the story(I did it for a bet, for the money, all the other great writers wrote pulp for fame and money!). I wish he had said he intended to sneak in humor and satire for the story seems to hover over that extreme unless you humor the madness of the narrator.

-- Anonymous, November 13, 2001