This document provides a summary of themes in Edgar Allan Poe's short stories. It discusses how Poe explored themes of the divided self through characters creating alter egos, obsession driven by fear or curiosity, the complex relationship between love and hate, the blurred lines between sanity and madness, the power of human will over death, and images of burial and crypts in stories like "The Fall of the House of Usher." The document provides examples and analysis of how Poe depicted each of these themes in his Gothic short stories.

1. Name : Kubavat Kishan
Roll No : 11
Semester : 3
Paper no : 10
Paper name : The American Literature
Year: 2015-16
PG Enrollment No:14101021
Submitted to: Department of English
M. K. Bhavnagar University
Topic: “Theme of Poe’s Short stories”

2. Edgar Allan Poe
Born: Edgar Allan Poe
January 19, 1809
Boston, Massachusetts,United
States
Died: October 7, 1849 (aged 40)
Baltimore, Maryland, United States
Occupation: An American
Writer, Poet, Critic
Poe can be considered the father
of the modern horror story.

3. Theme of
Poe’s
Short
stories
Self vs.
Alter Ego
Obsession
Curiosity
Love and
Hate
Madness
The
power of
human
resolve
Burial

4. In many of Poe’s Gothic tales, characters wage internal
conflicts by creating imaginary alter egos or assuming
alternate and opposite personalities.
In “William Wilson,” the divided self takes the form of
the narrator’s imagined double, who tracks him throughout
Europe.
The rival threatens the narrator’s sense of a coherent
identity because he demonstrates that it is impossible for
him to escape his unwanted characteristics.
Self vs. Alter Ego

5. The narrator uses the alter ego to separate himself
from his insanity. He projects his inner turmoil onto
his alter ego and is able to forget that the trouble resides
within him. The alter ego becomes a rival of the self
because its resemblance to the self is unmistakable. the
suppressed guilt that drives him insane and causes him
to murder his wife.
Suicide results from the delusion that the alter ego
is something real that can be eliminated in order to
leave the self in peace.
In “The Black Cat” the narrator transforms from a
gentle animal lover into an evil cat-killer.

6. The majority of Poe's narrators are nervous,
oversensitive, and given to excessive worrying or
strange fixations.
In his works, Poe explores the consequences of such
obsessive tendencies. In the case of the narrator of "The
Tell-Tale Heart," the protagonist's declarations of
oversensitivity are merely a thin disguise for insanity.
In other stories, obsession is driven by fear: in "The
Premature Burial," the narrator develops catalepsy and
begins to take myriad precautions because of his
overwhelming fear of being buried alive.
Obsession

7. In "MS. Found in a Bottle," the narrator overcomes his fear of
death by invoking the example of the crew of the Discovery and
by cultivating his sense of curiosity about the southern regions of
the Earth.
In "The Gold Bug," Legrand does not face imminent
destruction, but is instead driven by curiosity to decipher the clues
found on a scrap of parchment, and is ultimately rewarded for his
curiosity. In all of these stories, Poe treats curiosity as a sign of
the narrator's sanity and intelligence.
In both cases, the ability of the characters to set aside their fear
indicates their mental and emotional strength.
Curiosity

8. In many of Poe’s stories, he explores the similarity of love and
hate for example in the “Tell Tale Heart” and “William Wilson”.
Poe portrays the mental complexity of these two supposedly
opposite emotions emphasizing the ways they mysteriously blend
into each other.
In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the narrator confesses a love for an old
man whom he then violently murders and dismembers. The narrator
reveals his madness by attempting to separate the person of the old
man, whom he loves, from the old man’s supposedly evil eye,
which triggers the narrator’s hatred. This delusional separation
enables the narrator to remain unaware of the paradox of claiming
to have loved his victim.
Love and Hate

9. Poe writes in The Fall of the House of Usher that Usher
"entered, at some length, into what he conceived to be the nature
of his malady.”
What exactly is his "malady" we never learn. Even Usher seems
uncertain, contradictory in his description: "It was, he said, a
constitutional and a family evil, and one for which he despaired to find
a remedy--a mere nervous affection, he immediately added, which
would undoubtedly soon pass off.“ The Narrator notes an
"incoherence" and "inconsistency" in his old friend, but he offers
little by way of scientific explanation of the condition.
As a result, the line between sanity and insanity becomes blurred,
which paves the way for the Narrator's own descent into madness.
Madness

10. Ligeia is the foremost example of the power of the
will in Poe's short stories, as she agrees with the
epigraph's claim that "man doth not yield himself to the
angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the
weakness of his feeble will.
In the end, her will is enough to counteract the usual
inevitability of death, as seen in such stories as "The
Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar." By contrast, the
narrator of "Ligeia" and his second wife Rowena are
weak-willed and come to be dominated by Ligeia's
memory.
The power of human resolve

11. There are three images of would-be "tombs" or "crypts" in
"The Fall of the House of Usher." The house itself is shut off from
the daylight, its cavernous rooms turned into spacious vaults, in
which characters who never seem entirely alive--Madeline and
Usher--waste away.
Second, Usher's painting is of "an immensely long and
rectangular vault or tunnel," foreshadowing the third image of
a tomb, the real one of Madeline's temporary burial. What Poe has
constructed therefore is a kind of mise-en abime (storywithin- a-
story)--tombs being represented within tombs. The implication,
especially once the entire House of Usher sinks into a new grave
below the tarn, is that the world itself is a kind of crypt.
Burial

12. Thank You