For an essay. Please help me compare/contrast these 3 works of Edgar Allen Poe. For tonight. Thank you!!

"The Pit and the Pendulum" "The Cast of Amontillado" "The Tell-Tale Heart"

-- Anonymous, October 24, 2003

Answers

The irony of this terrifying routine question is that there is some general consistency in Poe themes and artistry that do make his works seem like obsessive variations. Pit- victim narrator overcomes his overwhelming polight and clever persecutors by contuinula reasoned escapes from their traps until the end when an outside rescue rewards his moral victory(but inevitable defeat). Historical setting in the previous generation in the dark fantasies of medievalist Spain(vs. the new rationalist French revolutionary Bonapartist)

Amontillado-the clever narrator is the murderer whose trap is inescapable because the victin is stupid. Though unsympathetic, the victims becomes so pitiable he cracks the proud veneer of the too boastful killer whose obvious clear memory of an ancient crime belies his cool claims(See the narraror perspective in "Annabel Lee" similarly, chillingly obsessed for too many decades). Nootice the motivation of the murderers in both stories seems slight, self-willed and sadistic, their organization counter to the reason of their victims- or any sane person. Both murder systems use traps, symbols and progression into ever more claustrophobic circumstances.

TT Heart- The classic murderer narrator who is psuhed beyond the malignant genius into the metaphysically insane, self-parodied and contradicted, self-defeated by his deranged Imp of the perverse so much that victim matters less than the other stories. The victim is so far symbolized and dehumanized in his surrogate self destruction that he cannot in fatc be killed and returns as symbol in the misperceived(he mispercieves everything) beating of his own heart. The trap is one spiralling into himself, the crime being a self-fulfilling means of destruction. Perhaps this takes the theme of the first two tales to its illogical extremes. All Poe's characters and narrators to some extent amplify their own(and our) horror not with the supernatural but with the shock of misperception and supreme chalenges to the will. That experience is more important, that personal aliveness more vital, than the significance of the crime or the plight of the victim. Such is the Romantic core in the individual protagonist, the self hero, the Byronic hero, who transcend all convention and reason though doom or damnation overwhelm their heightened amoral powers.

Poe's devices emphasize the supernatural within the perceptionof the psyche, the power of reason in extreme circumstances, the absolute primacy of will and sensation over the real world. That power drives the stories. Yet we first describe them for their surface plot and gross sensational crimes, forgetting the very first and most powerful thing they accomplish. Namely that by first person narration, leading our identification as readers into the extreme, OUR minds and feelings themselves have been trapped. A cold and rational enjoyment worthy of Montresor himself unless our dreams are bothered.

All the symbols, settings, passages of time, sounds, colors, emotions are orchestrated progressively in total unity to the production of one effect. Missing that makes us worthy of the madman in the TT Heart.

The Pit is discordant in being about a clever, intuitive and emotional victim who is rescued, who is not efficiently evil or turned against himself by madness. Perhaps the normal reader so identifying with the normal victim cannot be allowed to be buried in a horrible death in Poe's day and age, but like any good adventure story, rewarded by escape. This Poe does briefly and diffidently in anticlimax after the triumph of the soldier's will before two deadly choices remaining. Not to have done this might have shocked the reader into rebellion and discovery at Poe's teasing manipulation.

-- Anonymous, October 24, 2003

How nice of murky to write sam a paper for her class next day. Samantha might want to know that teachers and professors have software to look up this sort of work to check for plagiarism offenses. Original work is demanded of students. Plagiarism is a punishable offense in most academic settings.

-- Anonymous, February 23, 2004

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-- Anonymous, February 24, 2004

shutup you loser, sissy wannabe and i'm talking to the guy who wrote the latest answer before me

-- Anonymous, February 24, 2004

nice essay murkey

-- Anonymous, April 02, 2004

Did you know that Edgar allan Poe professed plagiarism as a sin?

-- Anonymous, December 09, 2004