Edgar allen Poe
...irteen. Virginia, Poe’s first ,wife died of consumption on Jan 30, 1847. It was said that Poe consumed himself in alcohol and opium when she past away. Poe became a perfectionist with his poetry and earned himself the title “Father of the American short story and mystery thriller.” Poe’s last year was divided among lecturing, writing poetry, and narrative. On October third he was found “extremely ill,” half conscious, and delirious outside a polling place. Four days later on the seventh, he died. Edgar Allan Poe’s importance as a short story writer may be seen in the meaning and significance in his stories, and in the influence of writers the world over. “Poe was a pivotal figure in converting the traditional gothic tale of mystery and terror into variations of a romantic tale and the modern short story by shifting the emphasis from surface sensationalism, suspense, plausibility of plot pattern to the “undercurrent of meaning” suggested by the symbolic language, subtle use of style, tone and point of view, the subconscious motivation of character, and serious interpretive themes”(Carlson 311). The diversity of his seventy works of short fiction represents not only a response to the demands of the literary marketplace, but also as an expression of his own deeper involving outlook on life, and his theory of the short story, especially “ the tale and effect”(Silverman 149). Written just two years after “The Premature Burial”, “The Cask” is Poe’s last and best-known short story dealing with what J. Gerald Kennedy calls Poe’s “obsessive nightmare”, his fixation on living interment. The threat of being buried alive is a psychological fear that Poe emphasized on, ambiguously, in this well-known short story. “In an attempt to keep living entombments from occurring, coffins and vaults were equipped with special springs and sounding devices to give the person mistakenly buried alive a chance to be rescued”(Platizky). In 1845, just a year before Poe published his short story, a mechanism was made that attached to the hand of a corpse that would at the slightest movement activate an external bell. Poe used a creative variation of this device with the jingling bells on Fortunato’s cap. I strongly agree with Roger Platizky when proclaiming that “The Cask of Amontillado” was Poe’s best short story dealing with living interment. I also agree with the suggested use of irony Poe illustrates with the bells on Fortunato’s cap. It coincides with historical reality as well. “Kennedy and others have shown that premature burial was a preoccupation in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America and Europe largely because death was more often in the hands of the medical community and funerals had become secularized”(Platizky). “There came forth in return only a jin...