Point of View Mystery as Seen in Edgar Allan Poeâs Short Stories The Fall of The House of Usher, The Tell-Tale Heart, and The Black Cat.
the narrator, it can be inferred that in narrator’s character of strangeness convincingly creates mystery. Poe also presents the narrator’s wife and group of
police as the minor characters. They are not developing at all, but their presence supports the intensity of the action.
2. 2. Point of View
Point of view is a way as the position from which the story is told. It is important in telling a story, for it determines how much the reader must know, and
can know of what is happening. It has significant functions to produce a certain effect in the story. This is an author’s chief method of placing the reader in the
framework of the story. Point of view helps the reader imagine and understand the author’s relationship with the character’s experience to his fictional world,
especially to the minds of the characters. As stated by Robert Stanton: If, therefore, we are to imagine a character’s experience, we must share
his point of view. But if we are also to understand his experience, we must understand his point of view; and understanding is different from
sharing. We must understand the character himself, and consciously recognize everything that colors his view of things Stanton, 1965:
28. In a story a character’s experience is the “camera”. Like the camera, a character
can brings us into an author’s point of view so that we share his experience. Also the author must be able to remove reader from the character so that reader can
contemplate and understand him. The technique of narration that Poe commonly writes is first person point
of view. For Poe, the narrator becomes one of the characters of the tale. The narrator as a main character tells his own story. The narrator conveys his attitude
through the way narrative devices are handled, including choice of words. Sometimes the narrator will state point-blank how he feels about a subject; the
narrator’s attitude is conveyed indirectly. The Fall of the House of Usher
does not use the typical, first person point of view, where the protagonist tells a personal account of a crime that he has
committed. The narrator is a character that acts like an observer. So it is easy for the reader to become “the friend” in Poe’s story, as both the narrator and the
reader invite into “strangeness and madness”. The narrator is connected to the Usher family since he and Roderick were once close boyhood. They have not seen
each other for many years. From the Roderick’s request that convinces, the narrator makes the journey in Roderick’s live. Roderick calls the narrator
“madman” However, the narrator escapes, to watch as the House of Usher crumbles into the deep and dank tarn.
The technique of narration that Poe uses in The Tale-Tell Heart is the first person point of view. He expresses that the narrator suffers an internal conflict, a
war between his own faculties, body and mind or mind and soul. No word is wasted and therefore affirms the theory of the short story as held by Poe.
At the beginning of the story the man’s appearance impressively arrests the reader’s attention. The man says that he is seriously nervous: “True -
nervous-very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?” Poe, 1990: 88. The man’s statement brings to a strange effect so
it creates a mystery in manself. The same effect is also found in the man’s manner of speaking:
“They heard -They suspected -They knew -They were making a mockery of my horror -this I thought, and this I think. But anything
was better than this agony Anything was more tolerable than this derision I felt that I must scream or die -And now-again -hark
Louder Louder Louder” Poe, 1990: 95. The man speaks in a “strange” manner. He betrays himself in his own
terror; sight terror the evil eye becomes sound terror the heartbeats. Poe presents his story of The Black Cat in a form of first person point of
view. Through the narrator the reader can perceive that the narrator wants to reveal his personal experience. It can be seen in the beginning of the story:
“For the most wild yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief. Mad indeed would I be to
expect it, in a case where my very senses reject their own evidence. Yet, mad am I not – and very surely do I not dream. But tomorrow I
die, and today I would unburden my soul. My immediate purpose is to place before the world, plainly, succinctly, and without comment, a
series of mere household events. In their consequences, these events have terrified – have tortured – have destroyed me” Poe, 1990: 197.
From the statement above, the man admits that his story is a terrible one. He wants to tell his story, which is not necessarily believable and so mysterious.
Firstly the man’s behavior implies that he is fond of animals: “I married early, and was happy to find in my wife a disposition not
uncongenial with my own. Observing my partiality for domestic pets, she lost no opportunity of procuring those of the most agreeable kind.
We had birds, goldfish, a fine dog, rabbits, a small monkey, and a cat. This latter was a remarkably large and beautiful animal, entirely
black, and sagacious to an astonishing degree. In speaking of his intelligence, my wife, who at heart was not a little, tinctured with
superstition, made frequent allusion to the ancient popular notion, which regarded all black cats as witches in disguise” Poe, 1990: 198.
Among the domestic pets, there is a special pet, a cat. The narrator is very fond to the cat but at the end the cat fall in terrible dead.