Edgar Allan Poe is one of the most eccentric and famous writers of the 19th century. Poe was tormented by the idea of death, not only physical but also spiritual. His anguish, mixed with the excessive use of alcohol, opium, and a marked obsession for women, projected him in a dark and travailed word of ghosts, fear, and visions. This darkness marked his entire life, and consequently all of his work as an artist. Proof of that are his famous short stories, in fact they are the real and only expression of his afflictions. Those who have studied Poe’s life can easily guess that most of the characters and situations he creates are not only the figment of his imagination, but they are also part of his personal background. Stories like “The Black
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Poe shows that hate and love are strongly related to each other, and he serves them, as they are simply two different aspects of the same powerful human emotion. In the stories the characters have a very good and precise opinion of themself they feel in control but when feelings of self-hatred grows in them, the character projects that rage onto a fictitious version of himself, and even though the stories are in first person, where is the main character who tell the story, the creation of this alter ego transform the main character in an external observer. In The Tell-Tale Heart, the narrator states his love for an old man whom he will violently kill and he will chop him apart. The narrator in a desperate intent tries to give a rational explanation to his madness ” True! --Nervous --very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?” exacerbating the difference between the figure of the old man, whom he loves “I loved the old man”, and the old man’s evil eye, which is the trigger of narrator’s rampage “Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold”. The illusion of being able to keep a net separation between what he love and what he hates allows the narrator to give a rational explanation of the evil he posses, justify his actions as good for his purposes. This situation can be used as an extreme example of the universal idea of Human condition, where evil and good are two faces of the same medal and sometime it just to hard to keep
Poe shows that hate and love are strongly related to each other, and he serves them, as they are simply two different aspects of the same powerful human emotion. In the stories the characters have a very good and precise opinion of themself they feel in control but when feelings of self-hatred grows in them, the character projects that rage onto a fictitious version of himself, and even though the stories are in first person, where is the main character who tell the story, the creation of this alter ego transform the main character in an external observer. In The Tell-Tale Heart, the narrator states his love for an old man whom he will violently kill and he will chop him apart. The narrator in a desperate intent tries to give a rational explanation to his madness ” True! --Nervous --very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?” exacerbating the difference between the figure of the old man, whom he loves “I loved the old man”, and the old man’s evil eye, which is the trigger of narrator’s rampage “Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold”. The illusion of being able to keep a net separation between what he love and what he hates allows the narrator to give a rational explanation of the evil he posses, justify his actions as good for his purposes. This situation can be used as an extreme example of the universal idea of Human condition, where evil and good are two faces of the same medal and sometime it just to hard to keep