Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe. Now there is a man you don’t meet every day on the street, partly due to the fact that he’s crazy, bizarre, and a literary genius. This man was born in Boston, Massachusetts on January 19, 1809 and became an orphan at a very young age when his mother died and his father had abandoned the family and let’s just say this, sometimes orphans grow up to be crazy, mad men. (AKA Voldemort) The most popular of his works is the Raven which was published in January of 1845. He also married his cousin and died due to unknown factors, but people suspect it was due to overdose, alcohol, brain congestion, cholera, heart disease, rabies, suicide, tuberculosis, or some other weird factor.

I have read much of Poe in a middle school English class. Poe has an amazing talent of drawing his reader in and keeping their attention. I do remember reading The Tell-Tale Heart before and it is one of my favorite stories of his. All during the story the narrator/main character is trying to convince us he is not mad, but doesn’t do a very good job of it. This reminds me of the movie “Chicago” and the song in the movie called the “Cell Block Tango” and how they try to convince you that they were right and killing these men, but we all know they’re guilty. So the narrator kills this guy and hides him under the floorboards, but the guilt eats him up alive because he can hear the loud heartbeat of his victim and eventually confesses. All during the story, I was thinking about how whenever I did something bad when I was a kid the guilt would just eat me up inside and I would end up confessing to my parents, even if they didn’t notice or expect anything.

Though I had read The Tell-Tale Heart before, I had not read The Cask of Amontillado before, but the story didn’t really surprise me. It was another story of revenge and is twisted and evil in a way. To get revenge on his friend, the main character puts Furtanato in a crypt and builds up the wall so he can’t get out, which in my mind is way extreme. I mean if I wanted to get back at someone, I would just teepee their house or prank them or something like that, not hole them up in a crypt and let them starve to death or suffocate.

            Edgar Allan Poe is a crazy man and likes to think out of the box and think of mad ideas of how to kill people. It works to keep his audience interested, but some part of me thinks that he had people he wanted revenge and that people in these stories of his may be real life people. However, I am only speculating and it could be that Poe was okay in the head and just had a vivid and wild imagination, but we’ll never know.