Edgar Allan Poe and Suspense in Poe and Jackson Term Paper

Edgar Allan Poe and Suspense in Poe and Jackson - Term Paper Example This can be accredited to the actuality that most of his stories were short, interesting and easy enough to be classroom material, or due to their ability at pandering the present sullen morbidity that is characteristic of early adolescence or late childhood. American literature reached its peak maturity in the XIX century through the works of different writers such as Melville and Hawthorne, Thoreau and Emerson, Whitman and Longfellow, Twain and Poe, who was oddly in his own category. He has had a far-reaching influence on not only mass culture, but he has been able to provide rare insights into elite culture. As an innovator, he was quite resourceful: it is evident through his invented modern detective tales such as The Mystery of Marie Roget, The Purloined Letter, and The Murders in the Rue. He, together with Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley, is a progenitor of horror movies (Datlow 59). Poe was always worried a lot about life after death, especially in terms of the body and soul bein g depicted in the number of his narratives that entailed characters being buried alive, or of corpses having a life as zombies or of characters who were kept, under hypnosis, animate. He was gifted in the creation of small, enduring images that have up to this era remained in the collective psyche of a wide range of audiences. In his work – The Masque of the Red Death – Poe describes an intricate floor plan for the imperial suite of Prince Prospero with the strange design of the ball-room location emanating from the Prince’s eccentric tastes of decoration and his love of the weird. All the seven rooms of irregular shapes add to the suspense of the viewer with there being a sharp turn at every twenty or thirty yard distances, with each turn eliciting a novel effect. All successive rooms had different colors, a sort of progressive journey through a range of garish hues with the last chamber being black. This view only got from a gaze through a window tinted red. T he reader is held in suspense due to his/ her vague grasp of the different room’s signature colors (Jackson 67). Soon, the imperial suite becomes the scene of a crime with both the prince and his guests succumbing to a succession of bloody murders committed by an unknown assailant. Furthermore, the architecture entailed in these successive rooms also adds to the sense of suspense due to their eliciting luminal spaces between the notions of reality and illusion. The architecture of the suite, which is complicated, is symbolic of the reader’s limited comprehension. In his other work – The Black Cat – the readers encounter a character who after getting drunk, releases his guilt and self-hatred on his wife’s pet cat by grabbing it but the cat bites him. In revenge, he takes out one of its eyes but this quickly heals, though the cat’s presence is a continuous reminder of his failings. Eventually, though, the narrator gets rid of the cat by hangin g it from a tree. There is a twist to this event with his house burning down except for a section of the wall that has sketched on it the image of a giant cat (Datlow 58). Later on, he finds a new cat that has much similarity to the first in a bar and he takes it home. The reason behind this was so as to aid in undoing his previous act of violence. The feline’