Incongruity Of Text And Character Archetypes

Edgar Allan Poe is a great American short story writer and poet, the founder ofhorror fictions and ratiocinative novels. His humorous stories reflect the Americansocial reality in the early half of the19th century. His mock on the false, ugly and evilphenomenon is still meaningful to readers today. His humorous tales play the role of alink between the past and future of American humor history. However, his humoroustales have been ignored by scholars.This thesis discusses the Edgar Allan Poe’s humorous tales and makes a researchon the cause of Poe’s tales of humor. First of all, the author interprets the definition ofhumor, analyzes the source of Poe’s humor and the features of his humorous tales. Thenthe author analyzes the text of Poe’s humorous tales in the four aspects: the incongruityof common sense, the incongruity of social culture, the incongruity of rhetoric and theincongruity of semantics.Meanwhile, the paper discusses the characters in Poe’s tales of humor, and findsthat humorous characters in Poe’s tales of humor coincide with some of Jung’sarchetypes, for instance, the trickster, the hero, the demon, and the teased. The heroarchetype is demonstrated in many of Poe’s fictions, such as Thingum Bob in Literarylife of Thingum Bob, ESQ, Blackwood in “How to Write a Blackwood Article” andSignora Psyche Zenobia in “a Predicament”. The trickster archetype is manifested byPendulum in “the Businessman”. The demon archetype is related to the Devil in“Bon-Bon”. Those archetypes are different from the real archetypes in society, whichproduces the incongruity of figures in Poe’s humorous tales.Firstly, the originality of the thesis lies in the finding of the archetypes in Poe’shumorous tales. Secondly, the thesis also makes an analysis of the archetypes in Poe’shumorous tales in the perspective of incongruity and explores the unique features of thearchetypes in Poe’s humorous tales. Finally, the thesis discovers the cause of humor inPoe’s tales, namely the incongruity of character archetypes.The thesis makes up for the research in Poe’s humorous character analysis and addsup to the domestic research on the traditional humorous theory studies of Poe’s tales. Italso interprets the cause of Poe’s humorous tales.In a word, humor in Poe’s tales of humor records American experience andaspiration in19thcentury and has a great impact upon American culture, especiallyupon American literature.