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Themes in the Works of Poe

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Edgar Allan Poe is known for his unique, but gloomy style of writing. Many people name the genre of his works, Gothic. Poes most recurring themes deal with questions of death, including its physical signs. He uses these trends in both his poems and short stories. Two of Edgar Allan Poes most famous pieces of literature, Annabel Lee and The Tell-Tale Heart, share many similarities, but at the same time, they share a few differences. In order to better understand these similarities and differences, one must evaluate the murders in both works, the guilt of the speaker and the narrator, how the stories revolved around death, and the obsessions of both the speaker and the narrator. Each one of Poes works of art has a someone getting murdered in it. In The Tell-Tale Heart, the murderer is actually the narrator, whereas, in Annabel Lee, the speaker is not the assassin. The narrator is frightened by the old mans abnormal eye, so he observed the elder for seven days and on the eighth day he murders the innocent man. This is not the case in his poem though; the speaker has not murdered Annabel Lee. The morose speaker claims that the angels took the life of Annabel Lee, for whom he has much admiration for. Although the murders in each story are a bit different, they both lead to a sense of guilt. However, the guilt in each of Poes writings differentiate. Guilt is a something that both the narrator and the speaker experience in each work. But the type of guilt each person encounters varies in a major way. In Annabel Lee the speaker is struck with the guilt of loss. On the other hand, the narrator in The Tell-Tale Heart, has a guilty conscious. He knows that he is responsible for the murder of the old man with the suspicious eye. This is much different from the grief that the speaker feels after the passing of Annabel Lee. Both of Edgar Allan Poes works contrast each other in several ways, however they also share many similarities. One of

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