Adgar Allan Poe’s devices for heightening the effect of horror and terror in short stories
A.A.Poe is called a real master of horror stories. It is suggested that reading his works is an experience that anyone would be poorer without, for the author has constructed a universe to which there is nothing comparable in any literature. He developed the devices for producing the effect of terror established long before him by exhilarating the thrill and proved that our life is a complete mystery. The earliest work written by Poe, “M.S. Found in a Bottle” won an award in 1883 and made the author sure that such garner is superior for expressing his ideas and exploring human psyche as he was particularly interested in it. The story still remains one of the best examples of its kind and presents quite fully all the devices used by Poe that make us tremble with fear.
First of all I should say that the subject itself is extremely mysterious as the author wrote from the standpoint of psychology dealing with abnormal states of mind. At the same time he offered us the story and its frightening mystery as a real event. Putting a person in the center of the narration he gained an opportunity to study the way of person’s thinking and let the reader experience his emotions. Poe makes the narrator the central figure of the plot. Actually the story is written in the form of a diary, it is a confession of the narrator’s sole and this is why we tend to believe it. The reader stands very close to the narrator penetrating into his mind, observing his thoughts and becoming aware of the most private feelings. We even get some background information about the main character knowing that “hereditary wealth” afforded him “an education of no common order”, that he was a philosopher (was blamed for “deficiency of imagination” and German moralists gave him “great delight”) and had “a habit of referring occurrences, even the less susceptible of such reference, to the principles of that science”.
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The Effect of the Use of Irony on the Progress of Poe's Short Story, 'The Black Cat " This Paper will interpret a short story, 'The Black Cat', by Edgar Allan Poe. My Purpose is to show the effect of the use of irony on the progress of the short story. I Suspect that use of irony in Edgar Allan Poe's short story, 'The Black Cat,' is one of the main points which allows the hidden character of the ...
Learning about the narrator all these things as well as coming across various sea terms and concrete names ( Batavia, Java, Lanchadive Islands; poop, stem, stern, mast, aft, simoon etc.) prevent us from supposing that the story is an imaginary one. As a result the following horrors are perceived to a great extent and look very truthfully, especially the last dreadfully episode, “We are whirling dizzily, in immense concentric circles, round and round the borders of a gigantic amphitheater, the summit of whose is lost in the darkness and the distance!”
Speaking about the devices for heightening the effect of horror and terror the following episode is particularly significant. It is the most emotional and the most tense moment of the narration that shows the extreme despair of the main character. Surely the feeling is transmitted to the reader. But the essential result is being produced through out the development of the plot. It is suspense created with the help of the order of the events happening step by step as well as with the help of special images and symbols that make us expect something awful and frightening.
The role of nature descriptions, color and light is particularly important. First “a very singular, isolated cloud” created uneasiness of the narrator, then “the dusky-red appearance of the moon, and peculiar character of the sea” generated his fears. ‘Sickly yellow luster” of the sun, the tempest and “black sweltering desert of ebony… wrapped in silent wonder” the sole of the narrator. And soon the man “could not help feeling the utter hopelessness of hope, and prepared himself gloomily for that death which…nothing could defer beyond an hour…” Having “a sensation which will admit of no analysis, to which the lessons of bygone time are inadequate…” he is haunted with a fear of death which made his mind paralyzed. Here begun the world of daydreams, trances and hypnotic states that Poe so often set his heroes into. And now we can’t distinguish reality from abnormality. We just observe the development of the hero’s terror that finally reaches the highest degree when the narrator exclaims, “Oh, horror upon horror!”
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Edgar Allen Poe Many a great author have come to inhibit to the world distinguished literary merit, some to be considered masterpieces of novelty, others to be frowned upon for not meeting the requirements of civilized society. Edgar Allen Poe was one of the authors frowned upon because his talent of writing was based on bringing out the fears and deep suspense of which a single person can barely ...
The feelings and the mental state of the main character are also submitted by various stylistic and linguistic devices. The author plays with tenses in order to produce an impression of great confusion and the permanency of the fear, its everlasting authority. When describing the events happened, Poe uses the past. But he turns to the present or the future when writing about the narrator’s impressions or plans for putting his manuscript into the bottle. And just at the end of the story the author starts using the present continuos as his hero is on the verge of disaster facing the eternity. Now time is slowing down and the narration is getting dashed with pauses which makes the reader shiver with horror again and again, “The circles rapidly go small – we are plunging madly within the grasp of the whirlpool – and amid a roaring, and belonging, and thundering of ocean and tempest, the ship is quivering – oh God! And – going down!”
A description of mental states which is virtually Poe’s own creation is not the only peculiar attribute in his short stories. The atmosphere of terror is also created by a specific selection of the settings. Such a trick was largely derived by the author from the tradition of the Gothic tale. Forgotten tombs, ruined abbeys, witches and vampires – all these formed the literature of that time. Poe also used in his fiction such uncanny creeps. In “M.S. Found in a Bottle” it is a black ghostly ship described very thoroughly by the author. She looks really strange and even “dreadful” as it is said. Being built of an unknown material and in old-fashioned manner the ship seems to be of enormous size. It “bore up under a press of sail in the very teeth of that supernatural sea, and of that ungovernable hurricane” and “inspired” the heroes “with a horror and astonishment”. The crew are queer too. The narrator calls them “incomprehensible” people. They pass him no notice and look very old, even obsolete. Later the hero realizes that they are just “the ghosts of buried times”.
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Some linguistic means also help to create the world of suspense and the atmosphere of old times. The author selects the words very considerably. Poe usually prefers Latin terms to common words of Anglo-Saxon origin. The style is more formal than informal. The expressions like “I will not fait to make an endeavor” stain readers’ attention as they are brought into an unfamiliar surroundings.
Such mysterious and horrifying settings help to create a specific atmosphere of fear. The effect is strengthen by the personification of the nature which is presented as a grand and awful force. In comparison with it a man is seen as a trifling creature. The author writes about the wind “every breath of which died away” and “the colossal waters” that “rear their heads above” the people. And the readers experience even greater horror as they realize the fact that all the natural phenomena are living beings. To increase the effect and make the language more expressive the writer uses metaphors and comparisons. It is said that billows are just like “demons confined to simple threats, and forbidden to destroy” and the ice is presented as “a gigantic amphitheater” and looks “like the walls of the universe”.
Language wasn’t the only instrument of Poe’s art. It is believed that he is a true master of color and light techniques. In “M.S. Found in a Bottle” the writer used a great variety of colors and their hues. However, there are notably no green or blue in the story, for the reason that they introduce a grain of vividness and cheer into the narration. At the same time the role of black is enormous. It is the predominant color and its various hues (“ebony”, “dusky”) are used to describe the nature and the objects around the main character. Sometimes “the darkness of eternal night” is slightly brightened by the color of ashes – gray which is precisely “hoary gray of white”. And there is also a great significance of red and yellow in the story. All these colors heighten the effect of suspicion and haunt our imagination with a feeling of tension, apprehension and scare.
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The state of soulful solitude of the main hero is particularly horrifying. Nobody hears or understands his worries, fears or thoughts though there are many people around the character. The captain of the ship paid no attention to the troubles of the narrator about the forthcoming tempest, the only survived “companion” wasn’t a good interlocutor as he didn’t know English. In the same manner the ghosts of the other ship don’t notice the hero either.
Apart from “M.S. Found in a Bottle” there are many other horror stories written by Poe. His language, style and images make them all diverse. Different kinds of narration present different devices for heightening the effect of terror and suspense. Still there is always something common in all of them that identifies their belonging to the pen of the great writer. In the book by Vincent Buranelli we read, “He (Poe) took a literary genre with a very high mortality rate – the Gothic tale – and transformed it into something alive and lasting”. It is not just a matter of art but also his “violent realism” that make us shiver with fear and experience the whole gamut of emotions. To summarize, it should be said that A.A.Poe was not only an outstanding author of many notorious works but a great psychologist, a scientist who explored the borders of human fears.
Bibliography:
1. Edgar Allan Poe, Tales of Mystery and Terror, New York, 1994.
2. Highlights of American Literature, 1995
3. Vincent Buranelli, Edgar Allan Poe, Boston, 1849
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... most of his literary works. Poe had a history of using the fear of death 1 Patel ... is the concept of mortality and the fear of death. Death is everywhere in the story, ... have mentioned the supernatural world, mortality, and fear, all things that transcendental believers consider to ... Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, and Edgar Allan Poe. An author defending the 3 Patel transcendentalist movement ...
