Illustrating An Idea - Plots + Themes

We were to choose from four different short story writers and find three stories written by them.  Then we were to write down major themes for each story as well as a brief summary.  The result is this blog post.  The author that I chose was Edgar Allan Poe.  The stories that I chose were “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” and “Silence – A Fable.”

“The Tell-Tale Heart” is a told through the eyes and thoughts of the narrator.  The narrator is living in the same house as an old man who has an eye that was like a vulture that always watched him.  The eye was bugging him so much that he decided that he needed to kill the old man to be rid of the eye.  Every night the narrator would come down the stairs and stare at the old man as he slept.  One night the old man heard the narrator watching him and started freaking out so the narrator kills the old man.  The police come and investigate the narrator who ends up confessing because he thinks that he can hear the old man’s heart beneath the floorboards where he buried the body.  One of the major themes is time.  More specifically it deals with how time can be manipulated through events; easily skewed.  Although the man kept repeating checking on the old man every night, it was almost as if he was obsessed with a schedule.  So, the story could be pushing people away from schedules; stating that the best way to live is without strong guidelines, more so on the whim.  Another theme is how that no matter how right you feel you are in any given situation; you’re most likely wrong.  A third theme is if you ever commit a crime, bury the body far away and brainwash yourself to forget it.  If you don’t do this, it will eat at you.

“The Pit and the Pendulum” is a story about a man who is brought to trial and found guilty.  So he is taken into a dark room.  The story follows the man as he continues to randomly wake up and fall back asleep.  Throughout the story as the narrator wakes up, he tries to figure out how large the room is that he is in, because he cannot see anything; it’s pitch black.  Also as he wakes up there is good and water next to him, which he always consumes.  The narrator is then tortured for the rest of the story as the pendulum slowly gets closer and slices into his stomach.  One of the major themes in this story is torture; more so it is a combination of mental and physical torture.  Mental manipulation is another theme in this story.  A third theme is suffering/depression.  

“Silence – A Fable” is a story follows the narrator who is a Demon.  In this story, the Demon talks about how he tortured a man.  The man sat on a rock throughout the weather changes that the Demon inflicted.  The Demon made it thunder, pouring rain, and the man still did not move.  Then the Demon grew angry and stopped all weather and sound.  It was when the silence encompassed the whole area that the man got up and ran away.  One theme is solitude.  There is always a time and place for being alone and just thinking it out.  Another theme is overthinking and how that can harm more than help.  A third theme is that nothing that we deal with in life is our own doing; someone else is always flicking the switches.