Reflection of Poe in His Characters

It is evident that Poe strives for mystery in his plots and to suspend his readers until the final passages of his short stories. There seems to be so much detail with very little action until the final scenes where he attempts to grasp our full attention only to confuse us even more so than before.  During each of his passages at some point I thought to myself that he has to be crazy. Yet Poe attempts to reassure readers that his protagonists are sane, possibly in hope that readers will not mistake Poe for being possessed by some mental insanity. I feel that if I were to have known Poe, there would be much resemblance between him and his characters.

Poe uses the term "gothic" in many of his passages. The scenes he set were with gloomy, dark, and haunted ambiances. In The Fall of the House of Usher his protagonist seems lost in this huge dark loft and to me it seems like Poe is almost saying that he is lost in a huge dark world he lives in. Even when he tells his version of a love story and his passion for Ligeia, he only gets to see her again at the expense of Rawena's suffering.  The Fall of the House of Usher ends with a "dramatic "killing of Roderick, but its' actually not so dramatic. Madeline doesn't shoot nor stab nor beat him. She just "bore him to the floor a corpse" (666). Rodericks death, the climax of the story is left ambiguous. The protagonist tells us that "I know little of my friend" (655). When I read this quote I found it ironic due to the fact that I seem to know very little about Poe- I can't figure him out.

The most evident resemblance between this crazed author and his crazed characters was in William Wilson. Poe once again created a narrator that he does not actually name or introduce. In this tale he says he will call himself "William Wilson", but there is no evidence of what his real name is. It seems as if he has a split personally that he is portraying through his characters. We talked briefly in class about how we are not exactly sure of how Poe died, but it may have been due to self-destruction through alcohol abuse. If that were true, the final line "how utterly thou hast murdered thyself" (680)  seems as if he could be portraying his battle again his own self.  In short, it seems that most of the mystery and the questions we have tend to be based on what is left unsaid in Poe's writings.