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Examples Of Ligeia And The Fall Of The House Of Usher

Decent Essays

Edgar Allan Poe is an American Gothic author from the 19th century. It is well known that Edgar Allan Poe was a master of suspense. The word ‘suspense’ is defined by the Oxford Dictionary to be ‘A state or feeling of excited or anxious uncertainty about what may happen.’ Two of Poe’s works are ‘Ligeia’ and ‘The Fall of the House Usher’. ‘Ligeia’ is the story of an unnamed narrator in love with his wife Lady Ligeia and how he copes with her death. ‘The fall of the House of Usher’ is the story of an unnamed narrator visiting his friend Roderick Usher at his house. Both of them are full of suspense and this is the main topic this essay will be focusing on. This essay will attempt to illustrate how Poe builds suspense in his short stories …show more content…

However, later in the story, the narrator is the one seeing movement and hearing sighs. But as the narrator is an opium addict, the reader also assumes it is a hallucination.
Because these two narrators are unreliable, the reader can’t trust anything to what it is about to happen. However, throughout the stories, Poe is leaving clues to the reader in order to solve the mystery. It is called foreshadowing and this what the second part will be dealing with. As it was said in the first part, Lady Rowena and the narrator in ‘Ligeia’ are seeing inexplicable things but it is considered as hallucinations. However, it is actually clues from the author, in order to prepare the reader to see Ligeia appear. At the beginning of the story, Poe takes the time to do an extensive depiction of Ligeia in order to the reader to be on the lookout for slightest resemblance. These “hallucinations” are only sharpening the reader’s attention because a small part of him knows something is happening but doesn’t know what and make him read faster to know the end.
Poe is also using foreshadowing in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’. At the beginning of the story, before the narrator enters the house he says: “Perhaps the eye of a scrutinizing observer might have discovered a barely perceptible fissure, which, extending from the roof of the building in front, made its way down the wall in a zigzag direction, until it became lost in the sullen waters of the tarn.” The small crack described shows

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