Edgar Allen Poe is a writer well-known for his dark and romanticized gothic literature. Poe stimulates the senses through sensory detail in which his words can paint a vivid mental picture in the minds of his audiences. Dark imagery is very prominent in Poe’s works as it relates to gothic literature. Dark imagery is how Poe speaks through his stories to set his mood and tone which commonly consists of a dark and mysterious atmosphere, characteristic of gothic literature. Poe’s use of imagery through his stories is prominent in his works, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Tell-Tale Heart, and The Black Cat. In The Fall of the House of Usher, Poe describes Roderick Usher in a way that uses all of the senses.
“He suffered much from a morbid …show more content…
Further on in the story, Poe uses a few words that describe the sense of sight and also the sense of feeling to describe a specific scene. The narrator in the story has been standing in the open doorway of the old man 's room for a while, waiting for the right moment to expose himself to the old man in order to startle him. “So I opened it you cannot imagine how stealthily, stealthily--until, at length, a single dim ray, like the thread of the spider, shot from out the crevice and fell full upon the vulture eye" (Tell-Tale Heart, 716), Poe’s intricate detail comparing the “single dim ray” to the “thread of a spider” creates a lamentable picture. Poe could have easily compared the ray to something that carried a positive meaning behind it but instead, to correspond with gothic literature he used the “thread of a spider.” “Thread of the spider," and "vulture eye" are just two images out of the many that Poe uses in "The Tell-Tale Heart" to stimulate his audience’s senses. Poe wants his audience to see and feel his descriptions as if they were real …show more content…
It is similar to his other stories that contain tragedy. “[I] grasped the poor beast by the throat, and deliberately cut one of its eyes from the socket! I blush, I burn, I shudder, while I pen the damnable atrocity” (Black Cat, 719). “Damnable atrocity” holds a discerning tone that seems to linger in the sentences after. Poe, again, wants his readers to become one with his words. To connect to his stories, he needs to be as detailed as he can to wrap up his reader the world he’s describing; a world that happen to be nothing but dark and spine-chilling. He succeeds in creating vivid mental pictures that entangle his readers into his flow of words. Richard Badenhausen’s article Fear and trembling in literature of the fantastic: Edgar Allan Poe 's `The Black Cat’ compares “when a nation watches the gruesome details of televised accounts of mass murders--there is an uneasiness about how to watch, but we do still watch” to The Black Cat and other gruesome works by Poe (Badenhausen). Poe’s stories can become horrific, but the readers still read even through the darkest
“He suffered much from a morbid …show more content…
Further on in the story, Poe uses a few words that describe the sense of sight and also the sense of feeling to describe a specific scene. The narrator in the story has been standing in the open doorway of the old man 's room for a while, waiting for the right moment to expose himself to the old man in order to startle him. “So I opened it you cannot imagine how stealthily, stealthily--until, at length, a single dim ray, like the thread of the spider, shot from out the crevice and fell full upon the vulture eye" (Tell-Tale Heart, 716), Poe’s intricate detail comparing the “single dim ray” to the “thread of a spider” creates a lamentable picture. Poe could have easily compared the ray to something that carried a positive meaning behind it but instead, to correspond with gothic literature he used the “thread of a spider.” “Thread of the spider," and "vulture eye" are just two images out of the many that Poe uses in "The Tell-Tale Heart" to stimulate his audience’s senses. Poe wants his audience to see and feel his descriptions as if they were real …show more content…
It is similar to his other stories that contain tragedy. “[I] grasped the poor beast by the throat, and deliberately cut one of its eyes from the socket! I blush, I burn, I shudder, while I pen the damnable atrocity” (Black Cat, 719). “Damnable atrocity” holds a discerning tone that seems to linger in the sentences after. Poe, again, wants his readers to become one with his words. To connect to his stories, he needs to be as detailed as he can to wrap up his reader the world he’s describing; a world that happen to be nothing but dark and spine-chilling. He succeeds in creating vivid mental pictures that entangle his readers into his flow of words. Richard Badenhausen’s article Fear and trembling in literature of the fantastic: Edgar Allan Poe 's `The Black Cat’ compares “when a nation watches the gruesome details of televised accounts of mass murders--there is an uneasiness about how to watch, but we do still watch” to The Black Cat and other gruesome works by Poe (Badenhausen). Poe’s stories can become horrific, but the readers still read even through the darkest