The Buried Life - Reading Poe's Short Stories

I’d like to share a few things about Edgar Allan Poe’s style of writing and why I think he is such an interesting American voice. This is my first time reading his short stories, but I now have a good sense of his favorite themes and types of characters. His stories are told using first person narration, usually by a character who seems insane. However, the seemingly-insane narrator walks us through his hyper-logical process of carrying out a horrible deed, whether against others or himself.

The narrations explore the pathological thoughts of people doing and thinking terrible, unacceptable, taboo thoughts, usually about harming for no good reason. This is what makes the thinking pattern so perverse. More disturbingly, the narrators show delight in committing perverse acts against innocent victims, but they can’t explain exactly why. However, in the end of these stories, the narrator feels overwhelming disgust for his crimes. Although these stories sound like deathbed confessions many years after the incident, the narrators seem to not feel true remorse for the acts. In fact, they seem to revel in the retelling of these horrible tales, and feel some relief in speaking them out loud.

Reading Poe is hard. Take the example of the first sentence of “The Cask of Amontillado”.

The thousand injuries of Fortunado I had borne as best I could; but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge (116).

This sentence uses the same structure as Yoda-speak. That is, the object comes first. The subject and verb follow. This means that “the thousand injuries of Fortunado” seem to be the subject. Our minds have to do a double take when we get to the true subject, “I.” Poe, the writer, seems to have fun scrambling the readers’ brain by using this kind of sentence structure because it hides the true subject. Another strange thing to note is that this man, Fortunado, hurt the narrator a thousand times, but one insult was the last straw? I don’t want to spoil the story, but the narrator does go too far with just one insult. To make things worse, the insult is never explained.

The high bar of Poe’s vocabulary also makes his stories challenging to read. Yet the challenge in interpreting his stories comes from his play with more common words, like “mason,” “cask,” and “cat.” “Cask,” for instance, is part of the title of the story I just mentioned. (A cask is a large wooden barrel to make alcohols, but it also sounds like a casket. That was a spoiler.)

Poe’s characters seem haunted by their crimes, but they show mixed feelings of demonic delight and horror in recounting these acts. Objects and signs show their guilt, following and even harassing them, but this doesn’t mean that the narrators seek forgiveness. They seem stubborn and brazen in confessing their crimes. In fact, I would say that they are greedy about having bragging rights to what they did.

Personally, my favorite story is The Black Cat because of the narrator’s stupidity – he brags to the wrong people, which ends up getting him in trouble. He can’t resist because his crime was so intricate and masterful. It seems that crimes can never be completely buried. Poe is himself an early master of the horror genre, in which the suspense is intense and everything horrible comes to light. One more thing: it seems like the confessors have to have the last word and the final interpretation of their acts.

- Kyujin