In life we experience the helpfulness and harmfulness fear has to offer. Fear can help us survive by making us careful and awake. Although this is useful, you start to obsess over the object that is causing you fear. You then become paranoid and unable to enjoy life. Many people experience fear different ways whether it be in a positive or negative way. In Poe’s short stories he demonstrates how all main characters experience fear but handle it differently. Poe uses symbolism, irony, and personification, to illustrate how fear distorts the narrator’s minds which then results in obsession and fear.
In “Tell-Tale Heart” and “Masque of Red Death” symbols distort the narrator's minds with fear and then end up in obsession. In “The Tell-Tale Heart”, the narrator obsesses over the old man's eye and is unable to think of anything else; “It is impossible...and night….I think it was his eye! yes, it was this!” (74). The narrator fears the old man’s eye because it is always watching him with judgement. He becomes so fearful of the eye it becomes all he thinks about. The narrator’s obsession with the old man’s eye pressures him to kill the old …show more content…
The narrator in “Pit and The Pendulum” is trapped in a pitch black dungeon where he never knows what torture is coming next. He perseveres through all of this with hope and logic that can be seen through the way he describes objects in his prison. The narrator describes candles as “white slender angels who would save me” (62) and the pit as “whose jaws I had escaped” (67). You can see the hope he has by comparing objects in his dark dungeon to more positive things. He may fear the pit greatly, but he escapes it because of his careful mindset. His fear of the pit prevents harm to him because he uses his fear thoughtfully to make him think straightly and give him hope. In the end, his logic and hope save him from the dreadful
In “Tell-Tale Heart” and “Masque of Red Death” symbols distort the narrator's minds with fear and then end up in obsession. In “The Tell-Tale Heart”, the narrator obsesses over the old man's eye and is unable to think of anything else; “It is impossible...and night….I think it was his eye! yes, it was this!” (74). The narrator fears the old man’s eye because it is always watching him with judgement. He becomes so fearful of the eye it becomes all he thinks about. The narrator’s obsession with the old man’s eye pressures him to kill the old …show more content…
The narrator in “Pit and The Pendulum” is trapped in a pitch black dungeon where he never knows what torture is coming next. He perseveres through all of this with hope and logic that can be seen through the way he describes objects in his prison. The narrator describes candles as “white slender angels who would save me” (62) and the pit as “whose jaws I had escaped” (67). You can see the hope he has by comparing objects in his dark dungeon to more positive things. He may fear the pit greatly, but he escapes it because of his careful mindset. His fear of the pit prevents harm to him because he uses his fear thoughtfully to make him think straightly and give him hope. In the end, his logic and hope save him from the dreadful