Post #8

Possible Thesis

The five stages of grief are reflected in poe’s writing.
Concerning his wife

Concerning his illnesses

Fear

Fear governs many lives. Those who do as they are told and study hard then find a safe and secure job are ruled by it. Those who stay within a bad relationship fear lonliness. And those whos close ones die fear death.

Edgar Allan Poe’s writing is reflective of his fear of death. Concerning his wife and diagnosis.

Note: Poe’s narrorators often dance around the main subject using subtlty and complex wording, until they’re finally face to face with the subject; In which case they must fully work out how they feel, and describe their fear using comparisons.

Writing Assignment # 8: Thesis Proposal

Edgar Allan Poe’s writing is a reflection of his thoughts of death, fears of death, and his way of coming to terms with death. Just like all citizens of our earth, Poe was faced with death and chose to come to terms with it and his feelings about it through writing. Having his young wife die early on gave Poe a taste of the grief associated with death. In 1842 having been diagnosed with heart and brain trouble and congestion Poe realized how close he himself was to death. Thus Poe began. Writing gothic, macabre, and dark romanticism, Poe explored these genres as well as those pertaining to mystery and science fiction; while he simultaneously works out he feels and comes closer to coming to terms with the fear and death itself.

Edgar Allan Poe’s characters are reflective of his thoughts; being that most of his works are written in first person, Poe gets to get even more in depth with his thoughts. The short story is The Premature Burial and The Pit and the Pendulum are proof of this in that their first halves are merely trains of thought with the story following. When one first reads The Premature Burial, one may be confused as to who the narrator is. Whether it is Poe or a character is not found out until later on in the story when the character describes events in his life and the conclusion of the story is at hand.

Hoaxes, fake new stories written as truth at the time and then exposed as lies later on, were a very profound way of expression for Poe. The Balloon Hoax was just a testing of the waters, to see how far he could go; while

Metzengerstein, the first story that Poe is known to have published, Silverman, 88, was his first foray into horror and was originally intended as a burlesque satirizing the popular genre, Fisher, Benjamin Franklin (1993).

Poe’s narrorators often dance around the main subject, death, using subtlty and complex wording, until they’re finally face to face with the subject; In which case they must fully work out how they feel, and describe their fear using comparisons and coming to conclusions. Poe’s characters often feel fear toward death and are confronted with it in the beginning or experience fear of death for the duration of the story until they come to terms with it in the end. In the case of the former, the main character is faced with fear and or death, acts on their feelings, and has to deal with the concequences. The Black Cat, The Tell-Tale Heart, and The Imp of the Perverse all have the main character commit an act of murder; subsequently dealing with the murder, death, and then being arrested.