Madness and Fear in Assignation, Cask of Admontillado, Fall of the Hous

Madness and Fear in Assignation, barrelful of Admontillado, do of the raise of Usher, and Masque of the Red Death Poes madmen are all in all obsessed with death. Existence in spite of appearance reality eventually becomes impossible. Poe usually places his madmen within a room or other enclosure, but they are rarely ever outside. When we do come across an exterior, nature does its best to repress, ensnare and enclose the man. The protagonist in Poes The Assignation sums up the conspiracy of time and space within Poes stories and says, I have border for myself a bower of dreams. Properties of place, and especially of time, are the bugbears which terrify mankind from the reflexion of the magnificent (301). The mental state of the character produces the setting and atmosphere, which usually results in the manifestation of that which is feared. The character manipulates his environment and uses tangible buildings and their contents as talismans or charms to outwit death. Howe ver, while the madman may try to circumvent death, it is in truth the experience of dying that he fears, and despite his best intentions, death comes anyway. The Cask of Admontillado features the madman Montressor who seeks relief from his tormentor, and plans the hone iniquity, to punish with impunity (274). Montressor painstakingly formulates the plan to unfreeze himself of Fortunato, his tactless and unsuspecting friend. The fact that the crime is detailed meticulously in Cask is odd considering the narrators obsession with planning the perfect crime and his equal obsession with the absence of detection. Does the anxious tone in the confession-like story indicate that Montressor falls victim to his own perfect crime and awaits execution? In his confession, Mo... ...sity Press, 1987. 177-214.Kinkead-Weekes, Mark. Reflections On, and In The Fall of the House of Usher. Edgar Allan Poe The Design of Order. Ed. A Robert Lee. New Jersey Barnes & Noble Books, 1987. 17-65.Poe, Edgar Allan. The Assignation. The apprehend Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. Hervey Allen. New York Parkway opinion Company, 1938. 293-302.Poe, Edgar Allan. The Cask of Admontillado. The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. Hervey Allen. New York Parkway Printing Company, 1938. 274-79.Poe, Edgar Allan. The Fall of the House of Usher. The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. Hervey Allen. New York Parkway Printing Company, 1938. 231-45.Poe, Edgar Allan. The Masque of the Red Death. The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. Hervey Allen. New York Parkway Printing Company, 1938. 269-73.