Poe- Analysis of 'The man of the crowd' and 'The tell-tale heart'

The Fall of the House of Usher

Roderick died for the same, while the narrator runs away, in time before the house collapsed. The text ends in an ambiguous manner: we don't understand if the sister is alive or is a ghost. Poe creates a sensation of claustrophobia in the story: the narrator is mysteriously trapped by the lure of Roderick's attraction, and he cannot escape until the house of Usher collapses completely. Characters cannot move and act freely in the house because its structure itself assumes a monstrous character of its own.

Poe creates comparison between the living things and inanimate objects, by debating the physical structure of Usher with the gothic family line of the Usher family who has been related to the house of Usher. The narrator realizes late that Roderick and Madeleine are twins (they are similar), she inherits all her identity in her body, whereas Roderick possesses the powers of intellect.

The Man of the Crowd

The story is introduced with a French epigraph. After an illness, the unnamed narrator sits in a coffee shop in London. Fascinated by the crowd (protagonist) outside the window, he considers how isolated people think they are. He also categorizes the different types of people he sees.

As evening falls, the narrator focuses on "a decrepit old man, some sixty-five or seventy years of age, whose face has a peculiar idiosyncrasy and whose body was short and thin." The narrator exits from the shop to follow the man, who goes into the poorer part of the city, then back into the heart of the mighty London the next day. Finally, exhausted, the narrator stands in front of the man, who still doesn't notice him: the narrator concludes the man is the type and genius of deep crime. The strange man is the only person that the narrator can't categorize; maybe he's wandering through the crowd in search of a lost friend or to escape the memory of a crime.

The impossibility to constitutes a Limit. The setting of London is important. Influence of the details of London's street by Charles Dickens. The protagonist is the city: with its continuous singular, metaphor of the new urban class society. Poe describes a lot of urban people as they were (the urban scene will be resumed by Baudelaire). Poe admitted in the text that there exist limits to the knowledge. Toward Emerson & Thoreau that even research knowledge.

The Tell-Tale Heart

The unnamed narrator says that he is going to tell a story in which he will defend his sanity. He confesses to having killed an old man.