Engligh Extended Essay on Egdgar Allen Poe

The first 200 words of this essay...

Dreams: How Are They Used By Edgar Allen Poe in His Short Stories and Poetry To Create Terror and Mirror The Narrator's Sense of Reality?

Nandini Chandra

Extended Essay

19th November 2009

Word count: 3984

Student number: 1267005

Abstract

This essay discusses the uses of the concept of dreams by Edgar Allen Poe in his short stories and poems and how they are used to mirror the narrator's or a character's perception of reality and create terror. The poems used were Dreams, A Dream, and A Dream Within A Dream. The short stories referred to are both from his famous horror collection and are called The Pit and the Pendulum and The Fall of the House of Usher. Poe uses a 1st person narration in both his short stories and his poetry, generally without giving an idea who the person is, nor is the narrator omniscient. This creates a blurry, dreamy effect which, in turn, creates the effect of fear. An example of this is the confused narration through The Pit and the Pendulum ends up emphasizing the torture that the prisoners of the Spanish inquisition were put through. His use of diction