First & Last Name
Professor Martin
English 2327
24 October 2005 This essay is short

Poe’s Scary Settings
	Every author has his or her own way of creating a mood, tone or theme using different literary elements in his or her own work.  Edgar Allen Poe is a master at using eerie descriptions, details and imagery to invoke fear, uneasiness, and suspense in the reader.  He often uses dark and dreary settings to tie into every element of his stories.  While setting is essential in “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” both settings are used for different reasons.  In “The Cask of Amontillado,” Poe uses setting to create an atmosphere for revenge and murder.  In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the setting of the house really represents the master Roderick Usher.
	In Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado,” Montresor vows revenge after he feels his name has been insulted.  The murder of Fortunato is rather easy because it occurs during a time of great festivities and drinking.  Montresor lures Fortunto back to his home and down into the dark, damp catacombs of his family.  “We passed through a range of low arches, descended, passed on, and descending again, arrived at a deep crypt, in which the foulness of the air caused our flambeaux rather to glow than flame” (Poe 1595).  This ominous setting provides the perfect background for murder.  The setting is further essential to the murder when Montresor decided to entomb Fortunato into the wall.  As Montrsor puts the last stone into the final tier, it is obvious that no one will every find Fortunato and the horrendous crime that occurred deep in the family crypt.  “I thrust a torch through the remaining aperture and let it fall within.  There came forth in return only a jingling of the bells.  My heart grew sick; it was the dampness of the catacombs that made it so . . . Against the old masonry I re-erected the old rampart of bone. For half a century no mortal has disturbed them” (Poe 1597).  If not for Carnival and the deep and dark catacombs, Montresor would never have been able to carry out the perfect crime.
	While setting is important for the plot in “The Cask of Amontillado,” it takes on a different importance in “The Fall of the House of Usher.”  In this story, the house acts as a representation of Mr. Usher.  The narrator describes the house as giving him terrible and insufferable gloom, and feelings of sickness and torture.  “I looked upon the scene before me-upon the bleak walls, upon the vacant eye-like windows-upon a few rank sedges-and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees-with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium” (Poe 1534-35).  This highly detailed description of the setting sets up the encounter and description of Roderick Usher that imitates the same images as the house. The narrator can not believe how much his friends appearance has changed in such a short time.  “It was with difficulty that I could bring myself to admit the identity of the wan before me with the companion of my early boyhood . . . The now ghastly pallor of the skin, and the now miraculous lustre of the eye, above all things startle and even awed me.  The silken hair, too, had been suffered to grow all unheeded. . .I could not, even with effort, connect its arabesque expression with any idea of simple humanity” (Poe 1537).  The narrator feels the same uneasy emotions looking at his friend as he does when he first comes upon the House of Usher.  Both Mr. Usher and the house seem to be intertwined because they give images of hollowness, gloom, sluggishness, and death.
	“The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” both use setting as essential parts to the story.  While one story uses setting as an atmosphere for murder, and the other uses setting to represent a character they both depict how setting is an important ingredient to any story.