Poe's Present Narrator

Something that really stuck out to me while reading Poe was his use of the narrator as an outstanding character in his stories. In a way we haven't quite seen yet in our readings this semester the narrator of each of Poe's stories has an incredibly important voice.

In Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans, the narrator played an important role but it wasn't nearly as present as as Poe's narrators, and it often contributed very different things to the story. His input was often minimal and relatively distant. The narrator functions as an observer who is passing on the tales of the war time stories, and sometimes expresses opinion, but whose function is ultimately to tell the story. In Emerson's writings, there is not a narrator as they are essays, however his voice is extremely prominent and his opinions and thoughts carry his writing. Throughout his essays he seems to establish his personal search and the search that everyone reading his works should take for a higher form of American culture (among many other things).

However, Poe uses his narrator differently. The narrator in Poe's stories are often involved in the stories, they are the protagonist and yet somehow we don't know all that much about them. In every one of his stories the narrator remains unnamed (except for in William Wilson where he makes clear that William Wilson is not his name). The difference between the other writers' narrators and Poe's is that Poe's narrators move the story along, they tell the story from within it, and seem to each narrator seems to somehow be ever-present. Even Poe's sentence structure seems to call attention to his narrator, for example in The Fall of the House of Usher he writes, "I shall ever bear about me, as Moslemin their shrouds at Mecca, a memory of the many solemn hours I thus spent alone with the master of the House of Usher. I should fail in any attempt to convey an idea of the exact characteristics of the study, or of the occupations, in which he involved me, or led the way" (658). In just two sentences he references himself five times. I find this interesting, because it seems as though Poe wants to convey his story through the eyes of someone, in an emotional tale, rather than a factual account. The Masque of the Red Death is the only story we read for today that contains a more passive narrator. I find it interesting that Poe uses this device, because it definitely heightens the suspense of the story if we can be emotionally invested in a character, and absolutely builds on the Gothic genre for which Poe is infamous.