An Interpretation Of The Tell-Tale Heart And The Fall Of The House Of Usher From The Perspective Of Existentialism

Edgar Allan Poe was an American poet, short fiction writer and critic. He was also a master of the horror tale, and the patron saint of the detective story. His life was not well. He lost his parents when he was two years old and didn’t have a good relationship with his adoptive father. Later, he lost his beloved wife when he was38years old and got habitation of alcohol. He had always been in a depressive mood, so he had mental disorders. In1849, he died in Baltimore. He was a special writer not only in the history of American literature, but in the history of the world literature. His fiction created a new form of American short stories. Most of his short stories have changeful plot to render the horrible atmosphere and give a strong mental shock to readers.The purpose of Existentialism is to explore the human’s condition. Existentialism considers that the people’s experience in this world is absurd and alienated, and advocates freedom of choice and personal responsibility. Poe’s short stories showed strong existentialist color, explained the survival of the plight of the characters, their true existence. Up to the present, there are few papers or works which criticize Poe’s short stories from the perspective of existentialism. So the author of this thesis would like to analyze Poe’s short stories, namely the Tell-Tale Heart and the Fall of the House of Usher, from the perspective of existentialism, supplying anew angle to study Poe’s works.The thesis consists of six chapters.Chapter One briefly introduces Poe’s life and his short stories, the literature reviews of Poe’s works at home and abroad and the feasibility of this study.Chapter Two introduces the origin of existentialism, its representatives and the key concepts:absurdity, alienation and free choice as well as the existential implications in Poe’s two short stories.Chapter Three aims at analyzing the absurdity of Poe’s two short stories. People living in this absurd world feel alone and helpless. The absurd people do a lot of absurd things.Chapter Four concentrates on the alienated interpersonal relations. It falls into two sections. The first section explores the alienation between man and man:alienation between the young man and the old man; alienation between Roderick and Madeline; alienation between Roderick and the unnamed narrator. The second section explores self-alienation:the young man’s self-alienation; the old man’s self-alienation and Roderick’s self-alienation. The alienated interpersonal relations cause their loneliness and despair, which in return aggravate the absurdity of their world.Chapter Five focuses on characters’free choice. In order to fight against the absurdity of their world and struggle from their alienated interpersonal relations, they make a lot of choices to pursue their freedom. However, they end up with death. Death is their last choice.Chapter Six is the conclusion which summarizes the existential factors in the two short stories. Although human beings live in a world which is full of absurdity and alienation, we can achieve real existence by free choices and being responsible for ourselves and others.