The Disturbed Life of Edgar Al

A detailed Summary of The Disturbed Life of Edgar Al

Everything that someone experiences in life will effect how he or she expresses himself or herself. For example, if you had a hard childhood and were orphaned at a young age, you probably would not be telling very cheerful stories. You would feel the need to get all of your anger out and to make sure that everyone knows what you had to go through in your life. Edgar Allan Poe experienced these issues along with several others. In most of his short stories and poems, he writes about death and decay, blood and horror. For example, in The Tell-Tale Heart, he explains how a man is driven insane by another man's glass eye, who plots his murder and buries him under the floor. Also, in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, there are many things that symbolize and foreshadow death and murder. There are three main topics that Poe uses in his writing that comes from influence: the father figure, the obsessions, and the fascination with death.

One of Poe's major themes was the father figure. Throughout Poe's life, he tried not to be like his stepfather John Allan, but to be a better person than him. Allan was cold toward Poe; he paid Poe a small allowance which drove Poe to gamble to try to make money but he ended up owing almost 2,

The last and most important topic in the works of Edgar Allan Poe is his fascination with death. In almost all of his stories there is at least one person who dies. This is probably caused by death in the family. Both of his birth parents died, his foster mother and father later on died, and his loving wife and cousin Virginia died. This experience influenced his writing a lot along with the items already mentioned. In The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, there are many references to death and murder; "stabbed him in several places", "he beat out the brains", "strangled him instantaneously", "deadly pale", and "gorging itself with the horrible flesh". In a biography of Poe, Vincent Buranelli expresses his opinion of him:

There is no doubt that Poe's writing does more than entertain the reader. It can be an understanding of the dark and shadowy world of Edgar Allan Poe. A person has to read his stories to fully understand and comprehend the disasters of his short life and how he reflected them into his writing. He knew that death was an unavoidable part of life but he tried to fight it as if it was not a natural part of life. The themes he wrote about in his stories-father figure, obsession, and death-are all experiences that Poe faced in his lifetime. He was an extremely pleasantly puzzling man who spent his life doing what he loved to do and who wrote over sixty short stories and over fifty poems. He was, and is, the dark side of all of us.

Edgar Allan Poe died in 1849, and was found "five days after he disappeared-drugged, intoxicated, and very near death" (Compton's CD). Poe i

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Approximate Word count = 1092
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: English