Compare And Contrast The Fall Of The House Of Usher And The Tell Tale Heart

The author gives a description of short story writer, poet and critic Edgar Allan Poe's place in the history of the U.S. is presented. As literary editor of "Graham's Lady's" and "Gentleman's Magazine," Poe became a major figure in American letters. Although his heavy drinking cost him his job, Poe continued to write in a cool style that was the polar opposite of his romantic poems and horror stories. Thomas Fleming gives details for his main idea that Poe’s works are widely known due to his technique of writing. Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Black Cat” is perfect examples of his suspenseful writing technique that grabs his audience, holds on to readers throughout the entire story and leaves the audience on the edge of their seats. Edgar Allan Poe’s stories are always thought of as being suspenseful and extremely dramatic. To achieve the suspense in Edgar Allen Poe’s, he uses gothic imagery to help add an unknown, eerie effect. The author, Thomas Fleming, gives an example with “…with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable

The short stories “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe and “House Taken Over” by Julio Cortazar are two well known works of literature that encompass unique literary styles. Poe utilizes Gothic literature in his story, a style of writing that incorporates elements of darkness, gloom, drama, and intense descriptions. On the other hand, Cortazar uses Magical Realism and its realistic characters, setting, and fantastic and unusual events to tell his tale. Despite the two being completely different genres, they share many similar traits, specifically relating to fear.

Fear is something that we all ponder about it, we are often pulled in with many authors different way of trying to explain it. In the gothic setting of “The Fall of the Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe and the magical realism of “House taken over” by Julio Cortazar lies a type of dark force within the extensive houses. In the fall of the house of usher we are introduced to the usher siblings and how they deal with the evil within their vast mansion in the middle of nowhere. In house taken over we met two siblings that live within the city and how they deal with their unstoppable force of evil. Both siblings have a different way of dealing with their house, some go mad because of it. The plot of both stories is similar but the way they explain their thoughts make the stories very different from each other. The authors try develop through the characters, setting, and plot that although both stories are different in many ways both captivate the reader with fear in different ways and create an overall different tone and atmosphere for the reader.

In “The Tell Tale Heart”, by Edgar Allen Poe, the reader is presented with the short story of a madman who narrates his murder of an old man because, “he had the eye of a vulture --a pale blue eye, with a film over it” (Poe 105). The narrator has thought thoroughly about his plan to murder this old man, and the murderer then stashes his body underneath the floorboards. Eventually, his guilt overcomes him and he starts hallucinating that he hears the old man’s heartbeat. Ultimately, he confesses to the police about his crime after being driven to the point of insanity due to his remorse. “The Tale Tell Heart” is one of Poe’s best-known stories because he utilizes the elements of Gothic Literature to establish a disturbing sense of mystery throughout the story. Farida characterizes Gothic Literature as “the elements of fear, horror, the supernatural and darkness” (Foster 1), and Poe effectively adopts this style in many of his short story. These ominous characteristics give the story both a dark and spontaneous sequence of events that draws the reader in. In “The Tell Tale Heart,” Edgar Allen Poe employs several Gothic elements such as the setting, emotion, and the word choice in order to communicate an uncertain description of reality. In any case, Poe 's technique definitely holds your attention coming into the story.

Edgar Allen Poe’s short story, “The Fall of the House of Usher”, sets a tone that is dark, gloomy, and threatening. His inclusion of highly descriptive words and various forms of figurative language enhance the story’s evil nature, giving the house and its inhabitants eerie and “supernatural” qualities. Poe’s effective use of personification, symbolism, foreshadowing, and doubling create a morbid tale leading to, and ultimately causing, the fall of (the house of) Usher.

Setting places the character and the action to a certain place so that the reader can visualize what is happening in the story. Setting is one of the most obvious similarities between these two stories is their settings. They are both set in dreary, dark, ominous houses for most of the action of the story. One of the houses is set at midnight and the witching hour, and the other house is in disrepair, and is almost disintegrating around the people who live there. Consequently, settings virtually always have implications on the story’s tone. The dark, dreary houses give the stories foreboding tones that add to the horror. Already Poe employs the same setting and tones in these stories that put chills down the readers spines, but they also show the similitude in his writing style.

Edgar Allan Poe, a well-known writer, even today, was born January 19, 1809, and died October 7, 1848. During his lifetime, Poe had written sixty-six short stories and seventy poems, and his writing was inspired by a dark past. Poe’s mother died of tuberculosis after his father abandoned them. Then, while living with a foster family, his foster mother died and his foster father disliked him. These events caused Poe to have a particular style of writing and in each of these a reader is able to see similarities between the characters, theme, setting, and Poe’s use of symbolism. In ‘The Cask of Amontillado’, ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ and ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ a reader can make these connections and see how Edgar

Edgar Allan Poe, a well-known writer even today, was born January 19, 1809, and died October 7, 1848. During his life time, Poe had written sixty-six short stories and seventy poems, and his writing was inspired by a dark past. Poe’s mother died of tuberculosis after his father abandoned them. Then, while living with a foster family, his foster mother died and his foster father disliked him. These events caused Poe to have a particular style of writing and in each of these a reader is able to see similarities between the characters, theme, setting, and Poe’s use of symbolism. In ‘The Cask of Amontillado’, ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ and ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ a reader can make these connections and see how Edgar Allan Poe put his feelings into words.

Edgar Allan Poe an American based writer well-recognized, even still today as being one of the greatest authors. He wrote many stories and poems like; “The Tell Tale Heart” and “The Raven”. Poe uses four key, story elements to create his theme of “The Fall of the House of Usher”. The theme infact is undoubtedly, dread. The first, of the four key elements is setting.

One thing that I noticed was all of the stories we read in class and “The Fall of the House of Usher” all have similar theme of death. In “Annabel Lee”, Annabel dies, in “The Fall of the House of Usher”, Roderick’s sister dies, and in “Tell-Tale Heart” the whole story is about an unnamed murder and the murder he committed. Another similarity is that a lot of Poe’s stories have something to do with some sort of mental illness. Roderick from “The Fall of the House of Usher”, has many different mental illnesses he is going through, and in “Tell- Tale Heart” the unknown narrator kills a man because of his “vulture eye”. So there are many different similarities between almost all of Poe’s

In Poe’s works each of these characters are dealing with the same issues with the case of murder. The first being The Tell Tale Heart and The Fall of the House of Usher with hyperacusis which is the sensitivity to certain frequency and volume ranges. In these short stories both of these characters claims to hear sounds coming from the tombs of the ones they murder, which eventually grows louder until it becomes almost unbearable. In The Tell Tale Heart the question raises of whether the narrator was hearing other sounds that sound like a heartbeat, his own heartbeat or that of the old man, which could have also been false perception of sound. “He evidently suffers from distortions of perception (chiefly auditory hallucinations) and what are

Poe uses the supernatural to create a fear and set a mood in his stories. They are dark and always seem to have a surprise lurking around each turn. He reinforces the fear of an overpowering doom that cannot be escaped. In the story, The Telltale Heart, the imagery of a heart beating beneath the floorboards is riveting. You feel that the heart is really beating; it's not just the imagination of a madman. The narration is done totally in the first person and never gives the sex of the person. The narrator is described as the caretaker of an old man. This technique allows the reader to identify with the narrator/murderer and assume the caretaker is the same sex as the reader. When women read the Telltale Heart most feel the narrator is a woman, as most caretakers are women. When a man reads this story he believes that the narrator is a man, for most murderers are men. Poe puts good against evil through sharp contradictions in the story. The old man's deformed eye represents evil, yet the narrator describes him as never wronging her or insulting her. The narrator insists she is not crazy, but then commits

His characters are traditionally men who are portrayed in a bad way. This is probably caused by his bad relationships with his father and foster father. Poe used these tragic events from his life in his stories which led to the similarities in his writing. These similarities are represented by the three stories “The Cask of Amontillado”, “The Fall of the House of Usher”, and “The Tell-Tale Heart”.

Finally, Edgar Allan Poe can be regarded as the architect of the modern short story (“Edgar Allan Poe 1809–1849”). His works such as The Black Cat, the Murders in the Rue Morgue, the Tell-Tale Heart, the Pit and the Pendulum, and many others leave behind an enduring image of macabre and mystery in just a short read. In these tales, Poe doesn’t just tell the reader a scary story, he lets them live it. With a fluid tongue, Poe paints before the reader scenes of terrors that leave the reader hanging on the edge of their seats in built up suspense. In some of his stories he puts the reader in the role of the executioner or even in the victim’s role. For example in The Tell-Tale Heart, The narrator is trying to prove his sanity to himself just after he had murdered his aged roommate. In this story the narrator is driven murderous by the elderly man’s lustrous eye, as one goes through the tale the reader lives through the act of the horrific dismembering and even feels the pressure the narrator does as he reveals his crime to the police. “I talked more and with a

Gothic horror literature has induced feelings of fear, shock, and abhorrence to many readers since the eighteenth century. American writer, editor, critic, and poet, Edgar Allan Poe became a highly influential figure in the world of literature and is one of the first writers to develop this genre of fiction and horror. He is best known for his short stories that capture many gothic horror elements. In Poe’s popular short stories “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Poe can be described as a Gothic writer by exploring themes of death and darkness, madness and helplessness, supernaturalism and setting and architecture, in order to reverse the norms of rationality as illogical and unexplainable events generate fear in the reader.