![]() Found in a Bottle, the whole crew of the ship that the narrator finds himself seems unable to die or really live. In Ligeia, for example, death is not the end at all, and the line between death and life and ghostly purgatory keeps changing and dissolving, allowing Ligeia and Rowena to slip in and out of mortality. ![]() Sometimes Poe’s characters come back from death or are in a constant state of ghostliness or unreality. ![]() This obsession with death can lend a menacing, almost masochistic tone to the stories’ voices, and a feeling of unavoidable motion in the plot, as if the characters are in a downward spiral towards their ends.īut at times, the difference between life and death is not clear-cut, and this haziness between life and death only adds to the menace of the stories. ![]() In The Masque of the Red Death, death is personified and hangs over the story as a charismatic figure. In The Pit and the Pendulum, the expectation of death, first by hanging, then with the pendulum, then into the pit, forces the narrator to confront his own mortality time and time again. ![]() In each story, it is the threat of death that pulls the plot along and that creates the suspense that Poe's stories are famous for. ![]()
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