Poe in the Light of Day

Poe uses death as a theme in "The Tell-Tale Heart", "The Masque of the Red Death", and "The Black Cat". It is obvious in "The Tell-Tale Heart" when the main character kills the old man. It pops up again in "The Masque of the Red Death" when death come and kills the prince and all of his party guests. Again, it is prevalent in "The Black Cat" when the narrator kills his favorite cat and again, when he murders his wife. The deaths may have had something to do with the fact that all of the people I his life that he loved died from tuberculosis. Because of the death that surrounded him in his life, it became a theme in many of his short stories.

The difference that "The Black Cat and "The Tell-Tale Heart" share however, is that the narrators both suffer from mental illnesses. This could be a metaphor for Poe himself. Poe had a very dark life and a dark way of writing, it was no widely accepted the way it is now during the time he was alive. He was seen as crazy and it was very possible that people thought he was ungodly. The mental illness could have been driven by Poe's own personality. In "The Black Cate", the narrator became a drunk and that's when his illness began to manifest itself. Poe was also a drunk, it was leading into alcoholism, if not fully alcoholic. Poe may have noticed a change in his behavior because of the alcohol and exaggerated it in his stories.

The next thing that Poe emphasized in his stories, were the houses the characters lived in, In "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Black Cat", the houses had little to no description. However, in "The Masque Death" the rooms in which the party took place was very detailed and descriptive. Poe plays off of the saying "home is where the heart is". In the "Tell-Tale Heart" however, Poe made a mockery of the saying by having the dead heart continue to beat underneath the floor boards. And in "The Black Cat", the home started off happy and slowly became something dark and dangerous. This may have been a metaphor for Poe's home, he started off with a happy life and slowly everyone around him died of a disease and left him alone in his house to be depressed.

The main difference in "The Masque of the Red Death" is the theme of fear throughout. The chiming clock and the people stopping was the main source of fear. In my opinion, this came from Poe's fear of death. This particular short story was written around his time of death. I believe he knew that it was close to his time and he was afraid. His fear of the inevitable was manifested in this story of death being inevitable. He didn't want his life to end, but he knew it was coming anyway.