I need information regarding Poe's Narrative and his first-person narrators.More importantly the Narrators in "The Tell-Tale Hearth""The Black Cat" and "The fall of The House Of Usher" please!!! help!! draft due 11/23

-- Anonymous, November 19, 2002

Answers

You think of frist person narrative when you mention Poe but in fact he widely varied his narrations, from the actual murderer, to observer and even more remote yet identified teller. This is done purposefully to create the vague or biased viewpoints that often run at a horrific discordant counterpoint with the mind of the reader trying to get at the story(while falling into the mood and the traps). The Black cat is the horror of an ordinary, good and rational man swallowed up in the horror unleashed by drink in his life. He proposes constantly that you CANNOT understand even while the extreme drama makes you do just that. "The Tell_Tale Heart" is whooly the misperceptions of a madman that nonetheless catch us up in the progress and drama of his obsession. In "Usher" has to move us to an observer with one foot outside the door who can escape to tell the mmore horrific and total horror of the entire envirnment of "Usher" house, lands, man and heritage, mind, soul and body rushing together to doom. If Usher were to tell it you would only think him mad and of course he dies before the house completes its destruction. One step back by a captivated observer who notes the change from his boyhood visits, is enough to contemplate this more global horror as the world closes in upon this black hole, this doomed innocent and his sister born to the fate the narrator is told of and believes and artfully presents to us(we, thinking it is just a straightforward tale!)Reality is wedded to the theory and symbolism, not just in the diseased mind of the doomed protagonist.

Narrtive is meant to give more believeability and intimate rapport with the reader so two minds are mixed with the writer another step removed enjoying our discomfiture and manipulating our feelings. It also shows the famed Poe duality, a common split in the Romantic mind where heightened intuitive reason vies with grand mysterious forces. A narrator, even one mad, plainly puts the single mind at the helm as wild as the swings of passion and events may be.

-- Anonymous, November 20, 2002