Steroid Use

L.J. Mazzilli English Period: C 9 / 26 / 07

"The Mysterious Ways of Edgar Allen Poe"

Edgar Allen Poe had a distinct way to pull the reader into his stories. Whatever the story was about he made it that much more interesting by using two major elements of writing. The obsession and insane drive for eyes, and the destruction of characters in his stories. These two major elements were seen in the "The Black Cat" and "Telltale Heart". Death is always in the forefront of his stories and usually contains a twist that grabs the reader's interest and makes you wonder why this writer is so morbid.

Poe writes about the eyes as though they are the soul of his stories, telling the reader the feelings and drawing you into his tales. In the "black cat" the cat sees everything his main character is up to, following the "narrator" everywhere and seemingly judging him all the time. The cat's eyes are piercing and make the "narrator "feel guilty, then angry. In the beginning of the story the "narrator" talked about how his cat was his best friend almost and about how much he loved him and the loyalty he felt from his pet. "Pluto-this was the cat's name-was my favorite pet and playmate. I alone fed him, and he attended me wherever I went about the house". His eyes were the mirror to his soul. Then as he began to have murderous thoughts and the evil consumed him, the eyes of his cat proved to be too telling and he began to hate the very sight of his favorite pet. "I grew, day by day, more moody, more irritable, more regardless of the feelings of others. I suffered myself to use intemperate language to my wife. At length I even offered her personal violence." This disregard of people then transferred to his pets, and after drinking again at a local pub, he came home and couldn't stand to see the look of what he perceived was distain from Pluto and picking him up he took out a pocket knife and cut out one of the cat's eyes and flung him out the window. The eyes again were following him and so he lashed out at it as if to make all his evil thoughts and deeds go away. The man later is so consumed with evil; he ends up killing his wife in the cellar as she follows him down there to prevent him from killing his cat. He hides his crime by putting her body in the wall and plastering it up. Later the police investigating her disappearance are alerted to the wall by the sounds of a cat, which he had mistakenly buried in there with her......when they open the wall to expose the body, the first thing they see are the eyes of the cat. The eyes again exposing him for the evil deed.

Poe expresses the need to destroy his characters in his stories as well. For instance, in the "Telltale Heart" in the beginning, he tells the reader that he is not insane as if to make an excuse for his motives. He said he loved the old man and that he never wronged him, but his eye drove him crazy as a key factor in the motivation for killing the old man. Describing the old man in the story, the "narrator" says "one of his eyes resembled that of a vulture, a pale