论文总字数：44679字

摘 要

Chapter One Introduction 1

1.1 About Edgar Allan Poe 1

1.2 Research Background 1

1.2 Need of the Study 3

Chapter Two Literature Review 4

Chapter Three The Depiction of Death in Poe’s Short Stories 6

3.1 The Depiction of Death in “The Oval Portrait” 6

3.1.1 Brief introduction to the story 6

3.1.2 Narrative structure in the story 7

3.1.3 Changes of the young woman’s body 8

3.2 The Depiction of Death in “William Wilson” 9

3.2.1 Brief introduction to the story 9

3.2.2 Atmosphere created in the story 10

3.2.3 Changes of the protagonist’s personality and the theme of death 11

3.3 The Depiction of Death in “The Tell-Tale Heart” 13

3.3.1 Brief introduction to the story 13

3.3.2 The images created in the story 14

3.3.3 Changes of the protagonist’s psychological state 15

Chapter Four Influences of Poe’s Works on Subsequent Horror and Detective Stories 18

4.1 The Superior Development of the Horror Theme 18

4.2 The Introverted Development of the Horror Plot 19

Chapter Five Conclusion 20

References 21

Acknowledgement 23

Abstract

Edgar Allan Poe is known as the king of horror and one of the pioneers of the genre of science fiction, his works have propound influence on later horror and detective works. Among plenty studies of Poe and his works, the death theme is one of the main perspectives, and many of his horror stories have deeply impressed readers.

This thesis, based on the analysis of text, is aimed at studying the techniques used by Poe to depict death from the aspect of three different forms of death. This paper can be divided into five chapters. The first chapter is an introduction to the research background and need of the study; the second chapter is literature review; the third chapter is about the depiction of death in Poe’s short stories; the fourth chapter is concerned with the influences of Poe on later horror and detective works; the last chapter is a conclusion of the whole paper and the deficiency of the study.

Key words: Edgar Allan Poe; the techniques of depiction of death; forms of death

中文摘要

埃德加·爱伦·坡被誉为恐怖小说大师以及科幻小说先驱之一，他的作品对后来的恐怖文学及侦探科幻文学影响深远。在诸多关于坡及其作品的研究中，死亡主题是其中一大研究角度，因为坡的许多恐怖小说给读者留下了深刻影响。

本文在对文本进行分析的基础上，旨在探讨坡在小说表现死亡所运用的手法，并以三种不同的死亡形式为出发点进行分析研究。本文共有五个章节，其中第一章介绍了研究背景和研究目的；第二章是文献综述；第三种主要研究坡所运用的死亡表现手法，选择了三篇小说分别进行分析；第四章主要讨论坡的作品对后来恐怖文学和侦探文学的影响；最后一章总结全文，指出本文存在的不足。

关键词：埃德加·爱伦·坡；死亡表现手法；死亡形式

Chapter One Introduction

1.1 About Edgar Allan Poe

Known as the American author and poet of the romantic movement, Edgar Allan Poe(1809-1849) rose to critically acclaim for his poetry and short stories by the early 1800’s. His work also ventured in the genres of the macabre and mystery.

Poe and his works influenced literature in the United States and around the world, as well as in other specialized fields. A number of his homes are dedicated museums today. The Mystery Writers of America present an annual award known as the Edgar Award for distinguished work in the mystery genre.

1.2 Research Background

As one of the giants of literature, Poe and his works have become a research hotspot in literature circle. Studies on Poe and his works have been lasting for centuries. In 19th century, death and love are the two main themes of romantic literature in western literature. However, the depth and intensity of death in Poe’s works are far beyond works of other contemporary writers. It is said that Poe has depicted death thorough in the form of short stories, even now reading his works still shocks our soul.

Western researches on Poe and his works can date back to 1827, when his first poetry anthology was published. Poe is one of the most controversial writers in the history of America literature. Many well known writers and critics have quite different point of view on him; some do not agree with Poe, thinking him of “a jingle man”(Emerson), while some are in favor of Poe and claim that he was the most original American genius(Tennyson). Apart from the attention from writers and critics, Poe’s works have been popular among the public. Even with different reputation, Poe’s important status in American literature is indubitable.

Due to different opinions on Poe, the development of researches on Poe and his works have undergone three stages. From 1829 to the end of the 19th century, only part of Poe’s poems received recognition, the weird themes in his short stories as well as his dissolute life got widespread rejection. From the beginning of the 20th century to 1960s, as industry developed and modern philosophy emerged, which gradually changed people’s thoughts, Poe started to be recognized and became more and more popular among the public. Since 1970s, scholars studied Poe and his works from a wide range of perspectives, with diverse theories and more flexible methods.

Studies on Poe for over a century can be mainly divided into three parts. First, analysis on his works from the aspects of Poe’s personal experience and character. Second, analysis on the content of Poe’s work, from aspects of structure, images and so on. Third, analysis on the level of abstract structure. Skill, formation and content have been perfectly combined in Poe’s works, which give readers not only the sense of reality but also the feeling of aesthetic. Since 1990s, a craze on Poe study has appeared and because of which, the influence of Poe and his works has been expanded among literature and culture all over the world.

Poe’s stories, poems and literary theory also have influences on Chinese literature, especially during the period of the New Culture Movement. After 1949, studies on Poe have once stopped. Since China’s reform and opening-up, scholars have achieved developments on the research of Poe and his works. Translations of Poe’s collection have been gradually published in China and China’s academia have paid attention to Poe and made great progress on studies of Poe and his works. Now the translations of all of Poe ‘s novels and poems are accessible, but there are few translations of his literary theory.

Researches on Poe and his works can be divided into two stages. From 1982 to 1998, studies on Poe were in the prototype stage. Since 1998, an increasing number of related theses have sprung up, and more and more aspects have been taken in the research of Poe and his works. Scholars have achieved plenty research findings, which can be divided into four groups: theses about work interpretation, theses about writing style, theses about the theme of death and theses about comparison of works of Poe and other writers.

1.2 Need of the Study

In the 19th century British and European literature, the work with death as the eternal theme is also very common, but Poe's exploration of the theme of death is unique, and the depth and intensity of the connotation far exceeds the British and European counterparts. It can be said that Poe’s death is vividly played in short stories, and even if reread after more than a century, we still feel shocked.

From studying the works of Poe, we found that the death involved in his short stories is far more complicated than the death in reality. They are not only filled with rational and philosophical ideas, but also with mystery and terror. For the display of death, Poe is also painstaking. In about 85 novels he left behind, the ways of death have their own elaborate designs, and there is no similarity. However, although many studies on Poe’s works are about the theme of death, the research on how Poe expresses death and the methods and techniques used to represent death have not yet formed a system. This paper aims to analyze the theme of death in Poe’s works, and to help the reader to better understand the connotation of death under his pen.

Chapter Two Literature Review

Edgar Allan Poe, best known for his poetry and short stories, is generally regarded as the inventor of the detective fiction genre and one of the precursors of horror fiction. There are studies on Poe and his works since the later half of the 19th century. During the period of over a hundred years, researches on Poe and his works gradually develop and become deeper and wider.

In general, respects such as realism, symbolism, character images, writing techniques and so on have been studied by many scholars in Poe’s works. Apart from them, an important research angle is focused on the death theme. As one of the main themes in Poe’s works, researchers have attempted to decode death in his stories from various aspects with diverse methods. Some make a thorough analysis of death, while some others focus their attention on more detailed angles. Several valuable theses are as follows.

Wang(2010) discusses the theme of death and the reasons why Poe selects death as one of his major themes, which lacks concrete analysis. Zhang(2011) talks about death in Poe’s works by connecting with his personal experience, but neglects other objective factors. Gao(2015) did a whole analysis of Poe’s stories to explore the manifestation and reasons of death. By analyzing death in Poe’s works of different periods, Gao attempts to reveal the significance of forming the death theme. However, Gao does not mention in detail the techniques that Poe uses to depict death. Wang(2012) talks about Poe’s literary achievements from aspects of narrative structure, psychological activities of characters, atmosphere and humor, but fails to mention the influence of Poe’s works on later horror and detective works.

As we can see, foreign researchers have fully studied Poe and his works, compared with that situation in China. Comprehensively comparing large amounts of theses about death, it is not hard to find that there is deficiency in the studies about the depiction of death. In order to make up for the deficiency of the existing studies, the author will choose three typical stories of Poe to depict death deeply on the basis of analyzing the context.

Chapter Three The Depiction of Death in Poe’s Short Stories

One of the most common themes in Allan Poe’s short stories is the depiction of death, which is not the same in different works. This thesis chooses three short stories of Poe, in which the forms of death of characters are different, divided into sickness, self-destruction and murder. This chapter will select some representative texts for analysis, and study in sections to explore how Poe shows the death of characters in the stories and the methods used.

3.1 The Depiction of Death in “The Oval Portrait”

Sickness is a common form of death in Poe’s novels. The protagonists of his stories suffer from various diseases thus causing the body to weaken until death, such as “The Oval Portraits”, “Berenice”, “Morella” and so on. This section takes “The Oval Portrait” as an example to analyze the death form of sickness and to summarize the techniques used by Poe to depict death.

3.1.1 Brief introduction to the story

The tale begins with an injured narrator seeking refuge in an abandoned mansion in the Apennines. The narrator spends his time admiring the paintings that decorate the strangely shaped room and perusing a volume, found upon a pillow, that describes them.

Upon moving the candle closer to the book, the narrator immediately discovers a before-unnoticed painting depicting the head and shoulders of a young girl. The picture inexplicably enthralls the narrator “for an hour perhaps”. After steady reflection, he realizes that the painting’s “absolute life-likeliness” of expression is the captivating feature. The narrator eagerly consults the book for an explanation of the picture. The remainder of the story henceforth is a quote from this book —— a story within a story.

The book describes a tragic story involving a young maiden of “the rarest beauty”. She loved and wedded an eccentric painter who cared more about his work than anything else in the world, including his wife. The painter eventually asked his wife to sit for him as a model, and she obediently consented, sitting “meekly for many weeks” in his turret chamber. The painter worked so diligently at his task that he did not recognize his wife's fading health, as she, being a loving wife, continually “smiled on and still on, uncomplainingly”. As the painter painted near the end of his work, he let no one enter the turret chamber and rarely took his eyes off the canvas, even to watch his wife. “Many weeks had passed,” he finally finished his work. As he looked on the completed image, however, he felt appalled, as he exclaimed, “This is indeed Life itself!” Thereafter, he turned suddenly to look at his bride and discovered that she had died. As expected, the tragic ends abruptly.

3.1.2 Narrative structure in the story

Poe uses his own unique way of narration, focusing on the precision of expression and the ingenuity of structure. The arrangement of structural forms is a very important aspect for the creation of novels, especially for the creation of short stories. Poe did a great job at this point, and the structuralist narrator Todorov once commented on Poe: “In Poe's works, there is no imitation, everything is composition and game ... The story of Poe always has a strict structure”(Todorov, 2008:104).

The narrative structure used by Poe in his short stories mainly consists of three types: layer transfer type, exploring type and embedded type. Among them, the layer transfer type and exploring type are the overall structure observed from the novel. An embedded structure is formed by inserting a paragraph of text into the novels.[6] The embedded structure is generally used in conjunction with another structure. The combination of the two narrative structures is also a feature of Poe’s stories(Liu, 2012:16). In this section “The Oval Portrait” is a typical work of Poe’s using embedded structure.

In “The Oval Portrait”, Poe adds a seemingly irrelevant story in the story of the narrator. After the narrator was injured, the servant found a gloomy and magnificent castle to let the narrator rest. There were tapestries and souvenirs in the castle. The narrator found an oval portrait in the attic —— a portrait of a young and beautiful woman. Then the narrator found an introduction to this portrait in a diary, which was quite surprising. Next is the story about this portrait. The painter has a beautiful wife and he draws a portrait for his wife. Every night, he is addicted to his painting work. As the portrait is gradually completed, his wife is becoming more and more weak. The painter finished the final stroke and found that his wife had already passed away. The first one of these two stories is described by the first person, and the second story is unfolded by a diary. It can be said that the two stories are parallel, as there is not much intersection between the two; they are only connected by the castle, the portrait and the diary. It can also be said that the two stories are contrasted because both of the two stories take place in the castle, but the meaning of the castle is completely different(Wang, 2012:223). In the first story, the castle is the refuge of the narrator while in the second story, the castle is the place where the beautiful wife dies. The styles of these two parts are completely undesired, one is calm, reflecting the rationality of the narrator, and the other is chaos and madness, reflecting the artist's enthusiasm for art. Although the contents of the two stories are different, there is a strong emotional impact in them, and the two are perfectly combined.

Poe tells the story in the first person, without changing the imaginativeness of the story, instead, adding a sense of mystery to the story. It also tells us a weird and horrible story and ridiculous world through the mouth of the narrator. The use of embedded narrative structure can attract reader’ attention of the content, stimulate the readers’ interest, and make the the plots develop more naturally and smoothly, thus highlighting the strongest point of this story.

3.1.3 Changes of the young woman’s body and the effect

The death form of sickness is most evident the description of the painter’s wife in the second story:

She was a maiden of rarest beauty, and not more lovely than full of glee[7];... the painter, took glory in his work, ... so that he would not see that the light which fell so ghastly in that lone turret withered the health and spirit of his bride, ... Yet she smiled on and still on because she saw that the painter took a fervid and burning pleasure in his task, and wrought day and night to depict her who so loved him, yet who grew daily more dispirited and weak(Poe, 2016:269-270).[7]

The author expresses this sad story from the perspective of the first person, and uses the objective and calm tone to highlight the artist’s addiction and fanaticism to art and the woman’s deep love for her husband. The woman’s passing away and the painter’s completing the portrait, calling it “This is life!” have formed a sharp contrast, which highlights the desolation and sadness of the woman’s death and the painter’s confession of losing his love.

3.2 The Depiction of Death in “William Wilson”

In addition to the death form of sickness, Poe also writes a novel about suicide, and “William Wilson” is one. This story has a unique theme of suicide, and until the end we are just as awake as the protagonist. This section will expound the story “William Wilson” and analyze the techniques used by Poe to depict death.

3.2.1 Brief introduction to the story

The story follows a man of “a noble descent” who calls himself William Wilson because, although denouncing his profligatepast, he does not accept full blame for his actions, saying that “man was never thus ... tempted before”. After several paragraphs, the narration then segues into a description of Wilson's boyhood, which is spent in a school “in a misty-looking village of England”.

William meets another boy in his school who has the same name and roughly the same appearance, and who was even born on the same date (January 19, Poe’s own birthday). William's name (he asserts that his actual name is only similar to “William Wilson”) embarrasses him because it sounds “plebeian” or common, and he is irked that he must hear the name twice as much on account of the other William.

The boy also dresses like William, walks like him, but can only speak in a whisper. He begins to give advice to William of an unspecified nature, which he refuses to obey, resenting the boy’s “arrogance”. One night he steals into the other William’s bedroom and recoils in horror at the boy’s face —— which now resembles his own. William then immediately leaves the academy and, in the same week, the other boy follows suit.

William eventually attends Eton and Oxford, gradually becoming more debauched and performing what he terms “mischief”. For example, he steals from a man by cheating at cards. The other William appears, his face covered, and whispers a few words sufficient to alert others to William’s(the narrator’s) behavior, and then leaves with no others seeing his face. William is haunted by his double in subsequent years, who thwarts plans described by William as driven by ambition, anger and lust. In one caper, he attempts to seduce a married woman at Carnival in Rome, but the other William stops him; the enraged protagonist drags his “unresisting” double —— who wears identical clothes —— into an antechamber, and stabs him fatally.

After William does this, a large mirror suddenly seems to appear. Reflected at him, he sees “mine[my] own image, but with features all pale and dabbled in blood”: apparently the dead double, “but he spoke no longer in a whisper”. The narrator feels as if he is pronouncing the words: “In me didst thou exist —— and in my death, see ... how utterly thou hast murdered thyself”(Poe, 2016:540).[7]

3.2.2 Atmosphere created in the story

Poe presents us with a scene of horror, bizarre and darkness with his different ways of thinking and superb description techniques, and he combines the environment and effects to create a fearful and oppressive atmosphere.

In the story of “William Wilson”, it has been mentioned about the narrator’s life on campus. Based on the scene of “a large, rambling, Elizabethan house” in “a misty-looking village of England”(Poe,2016:517), taking the fierce and dissipated narrator as the protagonist, the story tells about a series of events that have caused the narrator to fall into pain. The narrator has mentioned in the text more than once the intricateness of the school room, the gloomy walls, the daunting gates, and the unimaginable side-by-side houses. These descriptions of the environment add to the school a sense of mystery and evoke a gloomy and oppressive atmosphere, thus paving the way for the conflict between William Wilson and narrator and his suspicion of whether or not his consciousness is clear.

The narrator repeatedly mentioned the complexity of the school building, and even the narrator himself did not figure out where the room of William Wilson was among the many small rooms. After a fierce quarrel with William Wilson, the narrator was going to play a trick on William Wilson in the night, but surprisingly walked into the his room with ease. The description of this plot is contradictory with the former plot, which made us realize that the narrator is unreliable, and even the narrator himself has generated doubts about the memory of William Wilson in his mind:

I could now find room to doubt the evidence of my senses; and seldom called up the subject at all but with wonder at extent of human credulity, and a smile at the vivid force of the imagination which I hereditarily possessed(Poe, 2016:529).

3.2.3 Changes of the protagonist’s personality and the theme of death

After reading the whole text, we can easily find that there is a clear clue of the changes in the personality of the narrator. The narrator said that he was born into a family known for his imaginative and excitable temperament, and he inherited this family nature at an early age. He used to give orders and let others surrender to him, except for a strange boy. The boy was born on the same day when the narrator was born, and even has the same name with the narrator. He was exactly alike the narrator, and lived in the life of the narrator in an image of an enemy and a friend. He struggled with the narrator to prevent him from violating morality and kept right distance with him. At first, the narrator can still endure this strange person. Because their same names are often confused, the narrator is more and more disgusted with him, and it is difficult for him to endure William Wilson’s noble personality and moral sense and the ubiquitous supervision of the narrator. Then the contradiction between the two became more and more fierce. The narrator decided to give him a lesson but was shocked after seeing the his face and quickly fled the school. Even if entering into a new school, the narrator found himself still under the invisible control of William Wilson, who destroyed his enjoyment life again and again. Finally, the narrator couldn't bear it, deciding to kill him to end this painful fate, but at the moment the sword pointed at William Wilson’s chest, he found that William Wilson was actually his own shadow —— he killed himself invisibly.

The narrator kept muttering to himself:

And again and again, in secret communion with my spirit, would I demand the question ”Who is he? —— whence came he? —— and what are his objects?(Poe, 2016:536)

The narrator can't uncover this mystery, but we can see clues and traces in the text. Gao claims that William Wilson is actually a product of the narrator’s rich imagination, he is the narrator himself —— the face that represents justice and kindness, an image split by the narrator himself(2015:12). Although the narrator inherited the bad nature of the family and did whatever he wanted, William Wilson has always played the role of morality, constantly reminding the narrator in order to stop him from falling into the fallen abyss. The narrator’s attitude toward William Wilson is also complicated, on the one hand, he is afraid of him, on the other hand, he is deeply disgusted and afraid of him. The relationship between the two is complex and secret, and the worsen relationship between the two means that the narrator gradually breaks away from the shackles of morality until the end of the self-sufficiency, and was declared by William Wilson:

“You have conquered, and I yield.... In me didst thou exist —— and, in my death, see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself”(Poe, 2016:540).[7]

3.3 The Depiction of Death in “The Tell-Tale Heart”

Murder is a common form of death in Poe’s stories. There are many murders in Poe’s stories, such as “The Tell-Tale Heart”, “The Black Cat”, and “The Imp of the Perverse”. These works describe how a normal person gradually changes from a normal state to a metamorphosis eventually. This section, taking “The Tell-Tale Heart” as an example, analyzes the occurrence of murder, and explores the methods used by the author to express the death of the character.

3.3.1 Brief introduction to the story

“The Tell-Tale Heart” is a first-person narrative of an unnamed narrator, who insists that they are sane, but is suffering from a disease (nervousness) which causes “over-acuteness of the senses”.

The old man, who is living with the narrator, has a clouded, pale, blue “vulture-like” eye, which distresses the narrator so much that he plots to murder the old man, despite also insisting that he loves the old man. The narrator insists that their careful precision in committing the murder proves that the narrator cannot possibly be insane. For seven nights, the narrator opens the door of the old man's room in order to shine a sliver of light onto the “evil eye”. However, the old man’s vulture-eye is always closed, making it impossible to “do the work”.

On the eighth night, the old man awakens after the narrator’s hand slips and makes a noise, interrupting the narrator’s nightly ritual. But the narrator does not draw back and, after some time, decides to open the lantern. A single thin ray of light shines out and lands precisely on the “evil eye”, revealing that it is wide open. Hearing the old man's heart beating loudly and dangerously fast from terror, the narrator decides to strike, jumping out with a loud yell and smothering the old man with his own bed. The narrator then dismembers the body and conceals the pieces under the floorboards, and ensures the concealment of all signs of the crime. Even so, the old man’s scream during the night causes a neighbor to report to the police, who the narrator invites in to look around. The narrator claims that the scream heard was the narrator’s own in a nightmare and that the man is absent in the country. Confident that they will not find any evidence of the murder, the narrator brings chairs for them and they sit in the old man’s room, on the very spot where the body is concealed, and suspect nothing, as the narrator has a pleasant and easy manner.

The narrator begins to feel uncomfortable and notices a ringing in his ears. As the ringing grows louder, the narrator comes to the conclusion that it is the heartbeat of the old man coming from under the floorboards. The sound increases steadily, though the officers seem to pay no attention to it. Terrified by the violent beating of the heart, and convinced that the officers are aware not only of the heartbeat but also of the narrator's guilt, the narrator breaks down and confesses, telling them to tear up the floorboards to reveal the remains of the old man's body.

3.3.2 The images created in the story

Poe uses his Unity of Effect as the principle of writing, and his choice of death as the theme of literary writing also depends on the principle of Unity of Effect. Poe believes that whether writing poetry or novels, writers must pay attention to the unity of effects, must always think of the intended ending, and make every plot essential(Cao, 2005). In “The Tell-Tale Heart”, Poe carefully arranges the two images of the eye and heartbeat, and repeatedly mentions these two images in the text, in order to achieve the preset effect, highlighting the psychological changes of the protagonist's metamorphosis, also adding a sense of horror to the death of the elderly in the text.

From the very beginning, the narrator felt chilly when he saw the eye that looked like eagle eyes, and he made up his mind to kill the old man to get rid of that eye. In English, “eye” sounds the same as “I”, which can be understood as the expression of the double personality of the narrator, mapping the self-disintegration of human nature. The narrator killed the old man and, while ridding the evil eye, killed his evil self as well. As the old man was killed, the other half of the narrator’s good self felt guilty and confessed to guilt, leading to self-destruction. From the deep meaning of the eyes, it is clear that Poe is painstakingly trying to arrange the image of the eye(Guan, 2014:112).

What’s more, the arrangement of heartbeat in the novel is also very extraordinary. Before killing the old man, the narrator exacerbated the horror that made him frantic when hearing the heartbeat of the old man, and emphasized that the heartbeat sound was like “a sound as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton”(Poe, 2016:544).[7] When he finally couldn't stand the growing heartbeat, the narrator killed the old man and ensured that his heartbeat was no longer beating. However, after killing the old man, the narrator still heard the heartbeat of the gradually increasing voice, once again emphasizing that the voice especially like “a sound as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton”. The narrator confessed his guilt when he couldn't stand the growing heartbeat again. In the text, Poe twice emphasizes what the heartbeat sounds like, he must have his own purpose. In a 2014 article, Guan states that Poe’s twice mention of the heartbeat seems to imply to the reader that actually the heartbeat originates from the narrator himself. Because in a very quiet environment, people can only hear their own heartbeat, not the others’. However, the author considers that Poe’s mentions of the heartbeat is aimed to reveal the changes of the narrator’s psychological state. The heartbeat appears all over the story, and echoes each other before and after the narrator killing the old man, thus achieving the expected preset effect in structure, and vividly expressing the horror atmosphere before and after the murder.

3.3.3 Changes of the protagonist’s psychological state

In Poe’s stories, the psychological portrayal of the characters is meticulous. It is precise psychological depiction that deeply shocks the readers, giving the reader the same experience with the characters in the novels.

“The Tell-Tale Heart” tells the whole process of a distorted, sick young man killing an old man. At first the narrator had a good relationship with the old man, but he couldn't stand the old man's vulture-like eye and killed him. Reading the whole text, we can find evident psychological changes in the murder of the elderly.

As the narrator said in the beginning of the story, he was got very well with the old man —— “I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire”(Poe, 2016:541). It is not hard to find the kindness of the old man to the narrator. But hate gradually appears in the narrator’s mind because of the blue pale eye of the old man, which made the narrator creepy. Thus the narrator decided to kill the elderly to free himself from the eye. Then come to the next stage that the narrator started his plan of murder. He behaved very rationally, sneaking into the old man's room for several nights, waiting for the best time to kill the old man, while by daylight he still showed good fellowship to the old man. “You should have seen how wisely I proceeded —— with what caution —— with what foresight —— with what dissimulation I went to work”(542)![7] As is said in the text, the narrator thought he was not crazy, he was just carefully doing a task. After the murder, the narrator even dismembered the corpse hastily and silently. Although the narrator claimed repeatedly that he was not mad, what he did during and after the murder fully revealed that he was not normal any more. He thought killing is a kind of pleasure, ridding himself out of pain. Even the police came he could remain calm and smile as if nothing had happened before. He has become a abnormal murderer, killing others just because of a vulture-like eye. For the reason of the murder, the old man’s blue, vulture-like eye can partly account for the crime, the other reason was the narrator’s fear of hearing the old man’s heartbeat —— “... I have told you that I am nervous ... And now at the dead hour of the night ... so strange a noise as this excited me to uncontrollable terror”(544).[7] The narrator was afraid of the heartbeat, and in order to prevent this noise from being heard by the neighbour, he killed the old man. From this we can find that the narrator has become completely abnormal, for the sound of anyone’s heartbeat could not be so loud that the neighbour could hear it. The narrator killing the old man now was not just to free himself from the torture of the vulture-like eye and the heartbeat, but also to get rid of the guilty of murdering and the shackle of morality(Wall, 2013:14). This is why the narrator could not stand the pain and admitted his crime when he heard the heartbeat again.

The story describes the narrator’s hatred of the old man, the old man’s kindness to the narrator, the best time to seek the murder of the elderly, the pleasure of the narrator after revenge, and the fear of hearing the old man’s heartbeat and the final collapse. These series of psychological depictions closely draw the attention of readers, making them feel that every reader is a narrator.

From what is said above, it is not hard to find that when depicting death, Poe more concentrate on changes of characters’ inner world. Through the aspects of narrative structure, rendering atmosphere and creating images, what Poe aims to depict is not only death itself, but also resistance to destiny and invisible shackle. For instance, the protagonist in “William Wilson” was born in a weird family studied in a dull and strange school, which to some degree have bad effect on him to form a correct view of morality and value. At last his suicide is not only the destroy of himself but also his despair to get rid of the shackle of this tragic destiny.

Chapter Four Influences of Poe’s Works on Subsequent Horror and Detective Stories

As the originator of the most prestigious American horror literature and detective novels, most of Poe’s works have been branded with profound Gothic aesthetics(Yunhadi, 2016:2). Whether in his horror works or in detective novels, Poe is obsessed with exploring the mysteries of life and death and the instinct of human beings in the face of death. His theme of writing is deeply rooted in the internal source of human terror, and his stories about murder, revenge, etc., make the reader feel creepy. This chapter mainly discusses the influence of Poe’s works on the theme and plot development of later horror literature.

4.1 The Superior Development of the Horror Theme

The prototype of Gothic literature comes from the folklore of wars of the gods or heroes and monster of the Middle Ages. In the battle of gods and devils, justice will eventually defeat evil. In addition, it also comes from the description of the scene in the Bible story where God or angels fight with evil. The revelation of the original sin of human nature in the biblical story, on the other hand, opens up the dark side of human beings in Gothic literature.

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