Mystery as Seen in Edgar Allan Poe’s Short Stories The Fall of The House of Usher, The Tell-Tale Heart,
and The Black Cat
Name: Riah Wiratningsih NIM: C.1398021
Abstract
Edgar Allan Poe was a famous American poet, short story writer, journalist, and literary critic who lived in 1809-1849. As the saddest and the strangest figure in American literary history,
he had unique style in expressing his works. Death played a major part in many of his writings. He blended the sorrow, despair, anger and suffer from loss, as in his short stories The Fall of The
House of Usher, The Tell-Tale Heart and The Black Cat. The death in the three short stories brings the reader to a mystery. This is interesting to be analyzed. In the three short stories there
are some questions, full of secrets, and have surprise endings. Mystery gives reader uncertainty about the conclusion of the story. In some stories the reader may guess the conclusion before they
even finish reading them, but when author adds mystery into their masterpieces, the stories become far more interesting and keeps the reader wondering whether the conclusion of the story
would end like they thought and therefore keeps the reader wanting to read more.
This research is descriptive; it takes form of statements, quotations, and explanations that found in the short stories. The method of collecting data is through library research. It is only a
study to book references, which are provided in library. After reading and understanding the short stories, essays, comments and other writing that support the subject matter of the research, the
researcher can analyze the three short stories. The purpose of the research is to reveal the mystery in Poe’s short stories The Fall of the House of Usher, The Tell-Tale Heart, and The Black Cat.
In order to achieve the purpose, the researcher employs structural approach as the guide step.
In those three short stories discussed in this thesis, Poe creates the appearance of mystery through idiosyncrasy of his characters. His technique of characterization can be identified with
the creation of uniqueness and strangeness. Point of view, setting, plot, foreshadowing, and diction support his technique of characterization. Based on the analysis, it is found that those
elements work in unity; inside everything contribute to the effect of mystery. Through those three short stories, it shows that Poe’s creation are dominated by mystery.
1. Introduction
Literature is an imitation of life, which expresses and communicates thoughts, feelings and attitudes toward life. Thus it can be seen as a mirror of life. Literature
generally gives people good lessons of life, for literature gives a chance for people to be wiser, to be realistic, mature and humane. So far it helps us understand
human sentiments, human interests, human problems, and human values. According to Rahardjo, literature endows us with vision, from which we can draw
our conclusion and interpretations about behavior, and about what is worth striving for in live Rahardjo, 1995:6.
From all kinds of literary works: prose, drama, and poetry, prose has detail in setting time and place, and narrative characteristics. These two points can be
found in novel and short story, whereas drama is a literary composition, which consists of dialogue, direction, narration and usually exposes human conflict.
Drama has three major divisions: tragedy, comedy, and tragicomedy. While poetry has arranged words in verse, rhythmical composition, fact, emotion in
imagination: kinds of poetry are ballads, epic, lyric and so on. As mentioned above, prose consists of novel, short story and novella. The
researcher will only discuss about short story, because short story is interesting. It is a short piece of prose fiction aiming at unity of characterization, theme, and
effect. It conveys a single mood, has a surprise ending and fast moving. By its nature, it concentrates upon a single incident or action. It has few characters. Its
setting and characterization must be evoked then developed in detail. Its effect must be made quickly and sharply. As being short it does not mean of being
slight. Short story should be long in depth and should give an experience meaning. The author would not tell the whole history. This implies more than it
tells to the reader. The style of writing varies in narration, description, and dialogue. When the author tells the reader what happens, he will describe events
in a clear, reportorial style. When he describes characters or a scene of the style,
his choice of words may become more poetic. He will use striking figures of speech to clarify the characters or the setting in order to help the reader visualize
them. He may also imply rhythmical sentences with an abundance of comparison and detail for the reader’s enlightenment and entertainment. It can be seen in the
short story The Fall of the House of Usher. Discussing about short story particularly, we surely keep well in mind that
there are three great American short story writers: Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Nathanial Hawthorne. The first one is widely known as the writer of
tales of mystery and terror. The researcher is interested in Poe because most of in his short stories, he wrote about death. Each page is filled with mystery with
torture, terrible death and ghost or demons. He used anger, loss, fear, loneliness and nervous characters to create reader’s suspense.
The popularity of his story spreads through Europe, especially France. Patric F Quin remarks: “Not only did Poe become a great man in France; he has become,
thanks to Baudelaire, a world figure...” Regan, 1967: 64. Therefore it is ironic that Poe’s works come into vogue earlier in France than in his own nature country.
His background of life can be said as the unhappy one. He is a man who has never been loved. He could only see the bad things in life, never the good. In
Poe’s writing man is always doing something to another object. This object represents Poe at some points in his life. For example, a man in The Black Cat
treated his cat unfairly; while, all the women in Poe’s life seem to die. These deaths play a major effect on Poe’s writing style and evoked a mystery.
Mystery tales in Poe’s works short story are interesting to analyze because there is something unexplained, unknown, or kept secret. This mystery
excites the reader’s curiosity, heightens the tension and increases the suspense. Surprise solutions hints through clues in the stories, many scenes and incidents
are revealed at the end, even though neither has a detective or an explicit puzzle to solve.
The researcher wants to discuss Poe’s work, especially his short stories, The
Fall of the House of Usher, The Tale-Tell Heart, and The Black Cat. Poe commonly writes in first person narration. The narrator becomes one of the
characters of the tale, giving the stories a sense of limited perspective and lending an air of believability. In the first short story, the narrator visits the mansion of
Roderick Usher and tries to open Roderick’s secret. The tale brings us to a feeling of shiver as we hear the Lady Madeline ascending from the tomb toward the room
where her brother awaits her inevitable coming. On that level the tale offers the readers the pleasure of mystery; in the architecture of the house, the rooms, the
furniture give a perception that everything in the house is mysterious. So does in the physical body of Roderick Usher and his characteristic.
The second short story is about torturing black cat by cutting one of its eyes from the socket and hanging to the lamb of the tree then killing the narrator’s
wife by axe and inserting the corpse to wall in the cellar. While in the last short story, it tells about the darker side of a young man who has killed an old man just
because he wants to get rid of his fear. Both stories are going to be tragic. The
narrator has done something sadistic and too horrible. Finally, it becomes a hidden mystery.
Through the three short stories, the researcher has found something mysterious. Poe blended his experiences with sharp idea as explorer on heartache
and suffering. We cannot find his unique style in others. In the researcher’s opinion, Poe’s stories are difficult to study. Studying his stories is a great
challenge. The researcher considers that those three short stories can be the representative of his creations. This stimulates the researcher to analyze his work,
which is focused on the appearance of mystery, that dominant in the three of his works.
In this analysis the researcher applies a structural approach to reveal the appearance of mystery in the three short stories. There are two approaches used in
every study of a work of art that are formalism and structuralism. Formalism sees literary work as a world of words. This approach is about mastering the language
or understanding the meaning of the words in the work. Whereas, it is not easy to understand the right meaning of the words in a work. It can be multi interpretable.
The sense of words and its context is needed to dig up the implicative and connotative meaning, such as the case in Poe’s works that is unique he puts the
unique object, unique setting, and unique characters and hard to study. So formalism approach is necessary to help the researcher in understanding the
meaning of words in a work. While structural approach is an important means to study the relationship
between one element with others in the work of art’s structure as a whole. All
elements such as theme, plot, characterization, setting, style, point of view, foreshadowing and tone all contribute to the total meaning of the work. Those are
separated from other things or extrinsic aspect; author, reader, and social culture must be pushed aside, because it has no correlation with the art’s structure. Both
approaches linked together in answering the problem statement. Here, the researcher took the element such as characterization, point of view, setting, plot,
foreshadowing, and diction to reveal the appearance of mystery in the three short stories. After examining those elements, the researcher finds the interrelationship
among them. At the end it bring to a mystery. Based on the introduction above, the researcher formulates the problem as
follow: “How does Poe create the mystery in his works as reflected in the short
stories The Fall of the House of Usher, The Tell-Tale Heart and The Black Cat?
2. Analysis
