Edgar Allan Poe Essay

Submitted By gaubertt12
Words: 1188
Pages: 5

Tabita Alarcon-Gaubert
English 102
Mr. O’Neil
October 8, 2014
Tomahawk Man Throughout the years you have heard or even read a few, if not all of Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories, most of which are sad and twisted; you get goose bumps while reading them and they make you wonder “who on earth would write such thing?” but at the same time you cannot keep your eyes away from the books or stories because you want to know what is going to happen next, no matter how sinister it might be. As I read some of Poe’s stories it got me wondering not so much as to who would come up with this kind of stories but more of a why. Could it be that the writer had pure evil in his heart? Maybe he might had gone through a few bad experiences in his life which inspired such writings, or perhaps his heart was broken a few times and this was his way of expressing his anger and coping with bad feelings. Whichever the case might have been, whatever the source of thought, it did account for some amazing reading that people now on days can still enjoy and talk about. Edgar Allan Poe was a Gothic fiction writer, he was born to a financial unstable family of actors his father David Poe left his family when Poe was just a baby but soon died and his mother Eliza Poe dies of Tuberculosis when he was less than 3 years old. Just by knowing these interesting and sad facts about Poe’s life you can begin to understand why there is so much darkness on his writings. He was left alone by his parents and had to be adopted before he even knew how to speak, a person’s most important growth development time is between birth and 5 years old, whatever happens during this time of growth can affect an infant’s life in the long run. In most of Poe’s stories they end up with the narrator or the main character killing someone in “The Tell-Tale Heart” the main character who is also the narrator goes inside the old man’s house every night a little bit further than the night before because he is simply tired of the old man and wants to get rid of him, he uses the word “Madman” a lot to describe himself he knows he is mad which makes it that much more interesting, most people that are crazy do not describe themselves as such. When he is finally able to kill the old man the main character cuts his extremities away from his body (head, arms and legs apart from his body) and then continues to bury him under the floor. Poe was always surrounded by death, both of his parents died around the same time, his first love died when he was only 15 the same way his brother passed away of tuberculosis and even his foster mother had passed away when he was 20, not only was he financially unstable he was also emotionally unstable which could be due to all of these deaths surrounding him, which also could explain why he enjoyed writing dark stories about death and killings of people. A person can be scarred for life because of the deaths surrounding him, but what can also trigger a person’s brain into committing certain unspeakable actions is the hope that is now gone because of a broken heart. Poe seemed to be a good looking man who had a few ladies in his life time. His first love, like I mentioned before, died when he was 15 which tells us right away his love life did not start off on the right foot. He became an alcoholic and started gambling to pay for school because his foster father did not support him due to the fact that Mr. Allan wanted Poe to be a business man but Poe did not feel like that was his calling. Before Poe joined the army at age 20 he was engaged to a woman named Elmira Royster whom he found engaged to another man when he went back to Baltimore. On his writings Poe is very ironic and he always tried to write about the “perfect crime”. I believe Royster’s treason is what drove Poe to write in a revenge and ironically kind of way as we can see in “The Cask of Amontillado” the main character tricks Fortunato (another irony, Fortunato means “one with fortune”, and this man