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How Edgar Allen Poe's Work Relates To His Life

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How Edgar Allen Poe’s Work Relates To His Life When people have negative experiences in life, many need to express their feelings about them. Some may choose writing as their outlet of choice. One writer who expressed their feelings about certain subjects in their life through writing was Edgar Allen Poe. Edgar Allen Poe’s life was dark and he chose to write about his problems and sorrows through short stories and poems. Edgar Allen Poe’s stories relate to his life and include the themes of madness and paranoia, revenge, and alcohol abuse. Paranoia And Madness Poe often wrote about paranoia and madness in his stories and poems. Poe experienced madness in real life. After the death of his wife, Poe went mad and only lived for another …show more content…

Poe experienced the craving for revenge in real life. After being sent to college by his father, John Allan, Poe realized that he didn’t have nearly enough money to pay for anything, even though his father was completely able to give him the amount he needed. Poe ended up trying to gambling to raise money and ended up delving so deep into debt that he was burning his furniture to keep warm by the end of the first term. Poe was very angry with his father for not providing him with enough money and wanted revenge upon him. Sadly for Poe, he never granted revenge upon his father. This is most likely why he wrote stories about characters getting revenge on others. The stories of “The Tell Tale Heart,” and “The Cask Of The Amontillado,” are stories written by Poe that relate to revenge. In “The Tell Tale Heart,” Poe writes about a person that kills an old man. His reason for doing so is because of the old man’s eye which he describes as the “eye of a vulture.” The person ended up killing the old man due to him wanting revenge on the “vulture” eye. Poe most likely wrote about this tale of a man killing another older man, due to him wanting revenge on his father. Additional information from the story that strengthens this connection is that the old man is wealthy, evident by the narrator saying that he had no desire for his gold, just like his father. This story symbolizes Poe’s desire to get revenge upon or to even …show more content…

Poe definitely abused alcohol within his lifetime. During the final days of Poe’s life, he was found intoxicated in a bar. After this, he was sent to Washington College Hospital. He died there surrounded by strangers. His fiancee and mother-in-law only found out about what happened when they read about his death in newspapers. Poe’s abuse of alcohol led him to drink himself to death in a bar or at least end up in a bar where is intoxication led him to die by other means. The stories, “The Black Cat,” and, “The Cask Of The Amontillado,” written by Poe, are about the subject of alcohol abuse. In “The Black Cat,” Poe writes about a narrator who used to love animals. In the story, he is now going insane and abusing all of them along with his wife. The narrator mentions that he suffers from “intemperance,” or alcoholism, and that this caused him to, “offer,” his wife, “personal violence,” meaning that he abused her and that he “not only neglected, but ill-used,” his pets. Since the narrator was drinking, these events can be attributed to his alcoholism. “The Black Cat” makes a statement about why drinking can cause harm to others besides yourself by showing that it can cause people to abuse others. “The Cask Of The Amontillado,” also is centered around the theme of alcohol abuse. In, “The Cask Of The Amontillado,” the narrator, Montresor, lures another character, Fortunato, into his catacombs where he then bricks him up in a wall.

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