Poe On Setting essays

Poe On Setting essays Edgar Allan Poe creatively uses setting in The Cask of Amontillado and The Fall of the House of Usher. The narrators in Cask and Usher describe settings that produce a dark and gloomy vision in our minds. Poes use of setting also seems to enhance the morbidity of Montresor in Cask, and Roderick Usher in Usher. The vivid use of setting in Cask and Usher create a sense of horror that compliments the outcomes in both stories. In Usher Poes use of setting gives us images of a deteriorating existence of the Usher mansion and the two remaining Ushers, Roderick and Madeline. The imagery Poe uses describes the Ushers and their home disintegrating from within, and as the mansion collapses physically, the Ushers are suffering a similar fate mentally. The narrators description of the Usher mansion is not one of where a prominent family would reside, but more of a seen from the 1960s sitcom The Munsters . While describing his feeling upon arriving at the Usher home the narrator expresses the emotions that filled him from his first glimpse of the decaying structure. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart-an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime (paragraph 1). The narrators description of the house and property of the Usher estate sounds like a condemned prisoner on deathwatch, awaiting his fate. Upon the bleak walls-upon the vacant eye like windows-upon a few rank sedges-and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees (paragraph 1) is the vision the narrator sets up for us as the story begins. When the narrator first sees his childhood friend Roderick Usher, he feels the greeting presented to him i ...