Poe’s Short Stories Essays

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Poe's Short Stories

Edgar Allen Poe is, perhaps, the most popular Gothic author in American history. Many of his stories show the darker side of humanity and provoke a sense of eeriness in the reader. But what exactly makes his stories creepy or uncanny? To answer...

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Poe's Short Stories

The opening words of the story “MS. Found in a Bottle” by Edgar Allan Poe are a quote from the French opera Atys, “Qui n’a plus qu’un moment a vivre N’a plus rien a dissimuler” (Poe 1). This translates roughly to the idea that a man who is dying...

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Poe's Short Stories

In both “Young Goodman Brown” and “The Cask of Amontillado”, evil is something that the characters carry with them throughout the stories. The revelation of their personal evil is a journey that begins with the ostensible picture of faith and good...

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Poe's Short Stories

For Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville, obsession is a central theme for their short stories. In Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the narrator expresses a negative obsession for the pale-blue eye “with film over it” of an elderly man, but also...