Edgar Allan Poe Unity Of Effect

A trip in Edgar Allan Poe’s remote controlled car.
We are all equipped with one of the most powerful and complex tools imaginable, the mind. The brain is our most precious asset however we are yet to comprehensively understand its diverse spectrum of abilities. We have become conscious to the brains different mental states and how they affect personalities. In Edgar Allan Poe’s (Poe) short stories he accurately represents the different altitudes of one’s attitude to create his prized ‘unity of effect’. Poe’s short stories “Tell Tale Heart (1843)” and “The Cask of Amontillado (1846)” are perfect examples of the many psychological states we can encounter. Poe uses his narrators as a vessel to express psychological states. The two literary pieces …show more content…
The ‘unity of effect’ is the effect in which the author intends to leave their audience, for many of Poe’s short stories this effect commonly incorporated horror. In order for Poe to create this effect efficiently he would go deeper than a simple murder story and instead play on the psychological states of the narrator to achieve his ‘unity of effect’ in a more complex way. The accuracy of these psychological states are what truly horrify the reader. Poe purposely played on the various levels of madness so precisely in “Tell Tale Heart (1843)” and “The Cask of Amontillado (1846)” to create the realistic feeling of being inside the human mind, and therefore his effect was … to the utmost level. Poe uses language devised to highlight the narrators’ troubled state, as well as writing in the first person which allows the reader to find themselves in the mind of the narrator. Poe’s puts the reader in the driver’s seat of a remote controlled car as he constantly reflects back to the reader and allows them to question them self. The arrogance of the narrator in “Tell Tale Heart” who does not consider himself mad, questions the reader whether they can trust the narrator but also whether they can trust themselves. Are they truly sane or do they claim it like the narrator? This is what truly horrifies the reader and what makes Poe stories undeniably timeless. …show more content…
Poe’s short stories are written in a first person narrative and we only see the story through their eyes which creates an unreliable narrator that produces unreliable confessions. Poe uses first person narrative to bring the reader into the narrators mind while his unreliable narrators cast doubt and add a sinister element to the stories. The use of first person narrative in both "The Cask of Amontillado (1846)" and "The Tell-Tale Heart (1843)" subjectifies human unreliability while also adding confusion and darkness to the narration. However precisely Poe’s short stories represent mental disorientation, the tales do not create images of insanity within particular individual. Both “Tell Tale Heart” and “The Cask of Amontillado” narrators share very similar mind sets in a sense that they are both driven to commit murder and have carefully crafted intricate plans. Although the narrators of “Tell Tale Heart” and “The Cask of Amontillado” both suffered from psychological issues they did not experience these issues on the same level as one another. “Tell Tale Heart’s” narrator presumably suffered from schizophrenia, where as “The Cask of Amontillado’s” narrator Montressor was fairly sane, although Montressor likely suffered from some sociopathic disorders. Poe shows that even people that seem relatively normal, like Montressor, can conceal their madness. The narrators of these two stories are