Edgar Allan Poe can only be remembered for one main thing, and that’s the horror he brought into all of his stories. He was a very sick, confused, and tormented man with many illnesses. These illnesses are betrayed in these three stories “The Cask of Amontillado, The Black Cat, and The Tell-Tale Heart”; they are betrayed in the rest of his work as well. Poe who had problems with alcoholism and taphephobia or being scared of getting buried alive, used those illnesses to his advantage in his work to kill off other characters. He uses many different types of figurative language in his work to set the tone and mood of these gruesome but excellent stories. One of the most common literary elements Poe uses is imagery; it’s used in every one of his stories to make you feel like you’re in the same room while he disposes of his enemy. Poe also makes good use of foreshadowing in the stories to keep you on the edge of your seat and wanting more; by giving you little hints as too what will come next in the story. Simile is one of Poe’s many ways to convey that his mind or the characters in the story remind him of some other object. He uses simile to compare his enemy to something more peaceful or to something darker to set a better tone throughout the story. Imagery, Foreshadowing, and Simile are three of many literary elements Poe uses in his work and I’m going to explain how he uses them in each of the three stories I listed above.
In “The Cask of Amontillado” imagery is used to a great extent. Poe makes you feel like you are actually down in the crypt when he says:”Its walls had been lined with human remains, piled to the vault overhead, in the fashion of the great catacombs of Paris; bones had been thrown down and lay promiscuously upon the earth forming at one point a mound of some size.” That’s pretty creepy when you picture bones and remains just piled up all over the place. Poe takes a different approach in showing imagery in “The Black Cat” by taking you from the dark
