20 pages • 40 minutes read
Edgar Allan PoeA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
The nameless Narrator doesn’t tell us much about himself directly, but he reveals a lot through his description of his ordeal, and through his reflections on the unconscious and the imagination.
Early in the story, the narrator says that those who faint are those who are closely in touch with the subconscious worlds and the imagination:
He who has never swooned, is not he who finds strange palaces and wildly familiar faces in coals that glow; is not he who beholds floating in mid-air the sad visions that the many may not view; is not he who ponders over the perfume of some novel flower; is not he whose brain grows bewildered with the meaning of some musical cadence which has never before arrested his attention (247).
The narrator himself is a champion fainter, swooning five or six times over the course of this story. His frequent journeys to the world of the unconscious make his sufferings extra acute.
Most of the narrator’s torture plays not on physical discomfort but on the imagination: The speaker is left in utter darkness to imagine horrors, he watches a swinging blade creep steadily down toward him over the course of days, and he knows that at any moment he could be forced into a pit that contains his deepest fears.
By Edgar Allan Poe
A Dream Within a Dream
Edgar Allan Poe
Annabel Lee
Edgar Allan Poe
Berenice
Edgar Allan Poe
Hop-Frog
Edgar Allan Poe
Ligeia
Edgar Allan Poe
Tamerlane
Edgar Allan Poe
The Black Cat
Edgar Allan Poe
The Cask of Amontillado
Edgar Allan Poe
The Conqueror Worm
Edgar Allan Poe
The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar
Edgar Allan Poe
The Fall of the House of Usher
Edgar Allan Poe
The Gold Bug
Edgar Allan Poe
The Haunted Palace
Edgar Allan Poe
The Imp of the Perverse
Edgar Allan Poe
The Lake
Edgar Allan Poe
The Man of the Crowd
Edgar Allan Poe
The Masque of the Red Death
Edgar Allan Poe
The Murders in the Rue Morgue
Edgar Allan Poe
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
Edgar Allan Poe
The Oval Portrait
Edgar Allan Poe
Allegories of Modern Life
View Collection
Fantasy
View Collection
Fantasy & Science Fiction Books (High...
View Collection
Fear
View Collection
Horror, Thrillers, & Suspense
View Collection
Mortality & Death
View Collection
Mystery & Crime
View Collection
Psychology
View Collection
Romanticism / Romantic Period
View Collection
Safety & Danger
View Collection