The Gold-Bug

Edgar Allan Poe's The Gold-Bug emphasizes the chasm between our perceptions and reality. Poe's ghoulish tone is not merely horror for the "gross out", as Stephen King calls it. The gothic elements in Poe serve the higher purpose of transforming our consciousness. One of the tell-tale signs of a Poe story is that truth is not easily accessible. When we confront reality it does not conform to our expectations. A metamorphosis, in the normal way of seeing things, takes place when we learn to question not only our general perceptions of subject but our own cherished convictions. Poe's horror supplies

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Character Analysis in the House of Usher

Poe meticulously details, from the opening paragraph through to the last, the development of the narrator's initial uneasiness into a frenzy of terror, engendered by and parallel to Usher's terrors (Wilbur p. 91). - The narrator attributes his fantasy to his subjective perceptions. We the readers never do know what is real, what is a dream or the product of mutual hysteria. "Shaking off from my spirit what must have been a dream, I scanned more narrowly the real aspect of the building" (Selected Works p. 200). - There is a split consciousness in the narrator's mind between

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Genre & Techniques in the House of Usher

Story of Consciousness - As in other of Poe's gothic tales, the delusiveness of the experience is rendered in and through the consciousness of the narrator, so that we participate in his Gothic horror while we are, at the same time, detached observers of it. In the image of the house as skull or death's head and the merging of the narrator's face with the face of the house, which is also Usher's face in the pool, we see once again in Poe the subtly ironic paralleling of narrative construction of the tale to its visual focal point and by

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Themes in the House of Usher

What is the significance of the close resemblance of Roderick Usher and his sister? Are the two the product of, and guilty of, incest? Did Roderick Usher intentionally try to murder Madeline, and did Madeline actually return from her tomb vampire-like, to claim her brother's life? Is the physical house actually "alive" and by some preternatural force of will controlling the destinies of the Ushers? Or is the story not a tale of the supernatural at all, but rather, a work of psychological realism? What then is the precise role of the narrator? And can the work

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