Edgar Allan Poe is highly regarded as one of the greatest horror writers of all time. He was born on January 19th, 1809, in Boston, MA and passed away on October 7th, 1809 in Baltimore, MD. Poe is successfully able to manipulate the feelings of the reader. He uses negative emotions such as fear, madness, and pusillanimity to accomplish this. There are many tragedies in the stories that induce these feelings of terror, such as the killing of the old man in “The Tell-Tale Heart”, the death of Prince Prospero in “The Masque of the Red Death”, and the betrayal of a friend in “The Cask of Amontillado”. In the tales “The Tell-Tale Heart”, and “The Masque of the Red Death”, madness is a key element that contributes to the feeling of terror that
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This very strange reasoning makes the reader very worried and uncomfortable. Poe ties in the same qualities of this narrator with the Prince Prospero in the next tale. In Poe’s famous tale, “The Masque of the Red Death”, the ruler of this fictional kingdom is seen through the eyes of the reader as a villain, mad with power because of the disregard of his people. His rash decisions and plans were seen as “...bold and fiery, and his conceptions glowed with barbaric lustre. There are some who would have thought him mad” (Poe 2). Poe is clearly making a connection to “The …show more content…
He has the same barbaric conceptions as the narrator from the other tale. Even though he is somewhat intelligent like the previous narrator, he still fails to think rationally when dealing with his problems. For example, instead of trying to fight/find a cure for the deadly Red Death, Prospero tries to create an imaginary ‘germ bubble’ (for lack of a better term), around his abbey. This causes his people to lose faith in him. Everyone outside of the fortified abbey dies of the terrible plague, enabling the reader to feel horrified of Prospero’s actions. Each of the insane characters in these tales showcase a lack of rational, which helps Poe capture his desired feeling of horror. In the tales “The Masque of the Red Death”, and the “Tell-Tale Heart”, Poe invokes a feeling of fear and uneasiness through the cowardliness of his characters. The pusillanimity of a nation’s leader is something that would
This very strange reasoning makes the reader very worried and uncomfortable. Poe ties in the same qualities of this narrator with the Prince Prospero in the next tale. In Poe’s famous tale, “The Masque of the Red Death”, the ruler of this fictional kingdom is seen through the eyes of the reader as a villain, mad with power because of the disregard of his people. His rash decisions and plans were seen as “...bold and fiery, and his conceptions glowed with barbaric lustre. There are some who would have thought him mad” (Poe 2). Poe is clearly making a connection to “The …show more content…
He has the same barbaric conceptions as the narrator from the other tale. Even though he is somewhat intelligent like the previous narrator, he still fails to think rationally when dealing with his problems. For example, instead of trying to fight/find a cure for the deadly Red Death, Prospero tries to create an imaginary ‘germ bubble’ (for lack of a better term), around his abbey. This causes his people to lose faith in him. Everyone outside of the fortified abbey dies of the terrible plague, enabling the reader to feel horrified of Prospero’s actions. Each of the insane characters in these tales showcase a lack of rational, which helps Poe capture his desired feeling of horror. In the tales “The Masque of the Red Death”, and the “Tell-Tale Heart”, Poe invokes a feeling of fear and uneasiness through the cowardliness of his characters. The pusillanimity of a nation’s leader is something that would