Theme Of Extreme Threats And Uncanniness In The Tell Tale Heart

Joyce Carol Oates author of “Where are You Going, Where Have you Been?” and Edgar Allan Poe author of “The Tell-Tale Heart” use the gothic elements of extreme threats and uncanniness throughout their short stories. When people are in situations where there is an extreme threat, they sometimes act irrationally and normal everyday things might even seem uncanny to them, making them lose their sense of sanity. The gothic elements of extreme threat and uncanniness are very important in these two stories because they evoke the reader 's emotions, to the point that they are feeling the way the characters are feeling. They reveal humanity 's fear of the unknown. Both main characters find normal things to be strange, as they fear what their fate will be. The main character in Oates story finds her own kitchen to be strange to her and does not even recognize it, The main character of Poe 's story finds an eye to be frightening and strange to him because it is a strange blue and …show more content…
As the main characters continued to lose their sense of sanity, the readers lost theirs to. In “Where are you going, Where have you been?”, Connie had a real extreme threat and it makes sense that Connie started to lose touch with reality. Whereas in “The Tell-Tale Heart”, the only extreme threat to the main character was himself. He could not think rationally from the beginning to the end of the story. And his insanity is what draws reader in. Both stories use gothic elements in a way that makes the reader feel scared because what happens in the stories are very realistic. It is not really the fear of the unknown that bothers the main characters in these stories but, fear of the loss of what they thought they knew. They find it hard to accept their reality and try to make the best of it. In both stories the narrator 's fears were a mental obstacle they needed to overcome in order to survive, but they could not overcome it and that was their