This blog centres around the late author Edgar Allen Poe's writing. The quotes reflect his styles and the elements he portrayed in some of his tales. The quotes come from the stories The Pit and the Pendulum, The Black Cat, and The Cask of Amontillado. Poe was a Gothic writer and the dark colours of this blog were chosen to reflect that. The blood red background is bright, but still rather dark in tone and feeling. The pictures with the quotes are, for the most part, very dark and were chosen because of that. The font of quotes on the pictures are lighter to make the quotes easily readable. The absence of music is not for lack of trying, computers and I have a love-hate relationship. If there was music, it would probably be dark piano instrumental, or just the sound of falling rain.

The narrator of The Black Cat is slowly but surely driven to madness by the animal that haunts him. I believe this quote shows the narrator succumbing to his withheld insanity with the help of his alcohol. It is in this slip that he looses his old self and becomes something almost unrecognizable to even himself. It is a great show of how a person can change under the right pressed mixture of circumstances and their very being. Poe shows how an ordinary person (in this case: the narrator) is able to be driven mad if pushed by the right trigger (the black cat). 

I believe that this quote from The Cask of Amontillado is a great example of Poe’s dark humor and irony. Montressor feigns concern for Fortunato and the cough he has developed. Fortunato finally says that he will be fine and to stop worrying because a silly little cough is not going to kill him and Montressor agrees. To Fourtunto, it just seems as though Montressor has accepted to leave it alone for now, but Montressor agrees because it is not a cough that will kill him at all and he knows that. Montressor knows he will be the one killing Fortunato. 

Fortunato dressed the part he was set up to play in The Cask of Amontillado.  He wears the symbolism like a bullseye on his back. Poe dresses up the victim of the story as a fool, a jester. It symbolizes Fortunato’s fate to be the one taken advantage of quite plainly, especially looking back on it. He puts his blind trust in Montressor, which proves to be his undoing and seals his fate. Fourtunato’s loud dress also offsets what black garb Montressor is wearing,. Starting off drunk and literally dressed as a fool, Fortunato was anything but fortunate in this story from the moment it began.

The narrator of The Pit and the Pendulum confesses in this quote that if he were in a better condition of mind he would just end his life right then and there. Staring down into the trap laid out for him, he realizes that this would have been the better way to go, but tripping and falling only saved him from falling into the pit. He knows that they were going to find a more horrifying and painful way of ending him. This shows the true character of the narrator. I believe it shows how afraid of death he really is. Although he presumes he is going to die in the end anyways and almost definitely in a terrifying way, he can’t bring himself to end his own life the less painful way. 

This quote from The Cask of Amontillado is showing a dark allusion to what Montressor has planned for the ignorant Fortunato. You can tell Fortunato feels almost completely at easy and certainly does not expect what Montressor has planned for him.  Montressor replies to his companion with “And I for your long life.” Poe has Fortunato reference the buried that repose around them, but what Fortunato does not yet know is that he is soon to join them in their final resting place. The reader is unaware of what exactly Montressor has planned, but when you read the quote again, after you know what happens, it becomes obvious that Poe was using dark humor to create an allusion to the unfortunate Fortunato’s fate.