The narrator’s final entry in “Manuscript Found in a Bottle” is full of vivid imagery and situational irony:
Oh, horror upon horror!—the ice opens suddenly to the right, and to the left, and we are whirling dizzily, in immense concentric circles, round and round the borders of a gigantic amphitheatre, the summit of whose walls is lost in the darkness and the distance. But little time will be left me to ponder upon my destiny! The circles rapidly grow small—we are plunging madly within the grasp of the whirlpool—and amid a roaring, and bellowing, and thundering of ocean and of tempest, the ship is quivering—oh God! and—going down!
The claustrophobic visual imagery conjured by the narrator’s description of the ice and the storm mirrors his emotional and mental claustrophobia as he nears his tragic demise. The frantic, violent movements of nature serve as representations of the narrator’s own internal turmoil. There is a degree of situational irony in the fact that the narrator is writing about his terror with such lush and vivid prose right up until the very end of his last living moments. Because of this over-the-top and desperate, somewhat unrealistic act of recording in the story, some scholars have even posited that “Manuscript in a Bottle” is a parody of the nautical fiction genre.
The visual imagery the narrator provides of Ligeia’s eyes is extremely powerful, as in the passage below:
“They were, I must believe, far larger than the ordinary eyes of our own race. They were even fuller than the fullest of the gazelle eyes of the tribe of the valley of Nourjahad. Yet it was only at intervals – in moments of intense excitement – that this peculiarity became more than slightly noticeable in Ligeia.”
Throughout “Ligeia,” the narrator makes repeated mention of the titular character’s “large and luminous orbs.” Her eyes come up as a subject of the narrator’s devotion, love, and obsession multiple times throughout the story—and with each description, his embellishments of her physical attributes grow in their lavishness:
The hue of the orbs was the most brilliant of black, and, far over them, hung jetty lashes of great length. The brows, slightly irregular in outline, had the same tint. The “strangeness,” however, which I found in the eyes, was of a nature distinct from the formation, or the color, or the brilliancy of the features, and must, after all, be referred to the expression.
In these quotes, Ligeia’s eyes take on an otherworldly quality. The unnatural strangeness of her eyes emphasizes her importance to the narrator and to the narrative, as she comes to symbolize an unattainable ideal of beauty and femininity. The narrator’s idolization of Ligeia is demonstrated through his adoration of her eyes, and the pedestal he puts her on becomes precarious upon her death. Thus, as the story progresses and the narrator grows mad with longing and grief—to the point where he can no longer distinguish between Ligeia and Rowena—Ligeia’s eyes take on a dark and dangerous quality, heralding his utter loss of the ability to tell reality from hallucination.
The visual imagery at play in the concluding moments of “The Fall of the House of Usher” is striking and terrifying:
The radiance was that of the full, setting, and blood-red moon, which now shone vividly through that once barely-discernible fissure, of which I have before spoken as extending from the roof of the building, in a zigzag direction, to the base. While I gazed, this fissure rapidly widened—there came a fierce breath of the whirlwind—the entire orb of the satellite burst at once upon my sight—my brain reeled as I saw the mighty walls rushing asunder—there was a long tumultuous shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters—and the deep and dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the “House of Usher.”
In the passage above, the narrator engages the reader’s senses to craft a scene of immense destruction, with particular attention paid to the fearsome sight of the House’s actual collapse. The blood-red moon, the cracked-open earth, and the bursting of light and otherworldly noise combine to form a scene of terror as the bonds of this once-great house are severed asunder (literally and figuratively). The tactile feeling of the fierce whirlwind, the musty smell of the dank river, and the swift rushing of the water contribute further to the sheer visual scale of the House’s collapse. By engaging each of these senses, Poe fully transports the reader to this scene of devastation within the story, making the horror that much more palpable.
“The Tell-Tale Heart” is full of auditory imagery. Sound—imagined and real—plays a large role in translating the paranoia of the narrator to the reader. Take the passage below, for example:
And now have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over acuteness of the senses?—now, I say, there came to my ears a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I knew that sound well, too. It was the beating of the old man’s heart. It increased my fury, as the beating of a drum stimulates the soldier into courage.
The beating of the old man’s heart while he is still alive stimulates the narrator to action, prompting him to end the man’s life as he had been planning to for the past eight days. Whether the narrator has supreme hearing or the heartbeat was merely a product of his imagination, the language he uses to describe the sound is noteworthy. The noise begins as a soft, muted sound but quickly grows, taking on the quality of a drum and therefore turning the narrator himself into an almost heroic figure for the act of silencing it. The narrator’s figurative comparison of his actions to that of a soldier's courage demonstrates his distorted view of himself.
Later, the narrator’s hallucination of an echo of this same sound drives him to confess his own misdeeds to the authorities:
Yet the sound increased—and what could I do? It was a low, dull, quick sound—much such a sound as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I gasped for breath—and yet the officers heard it not. I talked more quickly—more vehemently; but the noise steadily increased.
Thus, in the passage above, the steady drum beat which at first allowed the narrator to exercise his strength and power, and feel in control, becomes an ever-increasing signal of his own guilt. Sound transforms the narrative, allowing the reader an inside peek into the unreliable narrator’s inner psychology.
One of the stylistic elements Poe employs most brilliantly in “The Pit and the Pendulum” is his use of imagery to build an utterly overwhelming sense of being trapped. The moment in which the narrator allows himself to be rushed by the rats provides a perfect, visceral example:
This seemed the signal for a general rush. Forth from the well they hurried in fresh troops. They clung to the wood—they overran it, and leaped in hundreds upon my person. The measured movement of the pendulum disturbed them not at all. Avoiding its strokes they busied themselves with the anointed bandage. They pressed—they swarmed upon me in ever accumulating heaps. They writhed upon my throat; their cold lips sought my own; I was half stifled by their thronging pressure; disgust, for which the world has no name, swelled my bosom, and chilled, with a heavy clamminess, my heart. Yet one minute, and I felt that the struggle would be over.
The scene in the passage above blends extremely realistic visual and auditory imagery to create a sense of confinement and terror. The moment when the narrator is swarmed by rats is physically repulsive and grotesque. Words and phrases like “clung,” “swarmed,” “accumulating heaps,” “writhed,” and “stifled” connote feelings of drowning and suffocation, of consumption and gross physicality. The narrator’s comparison of the rats to “fresh troops” indicates the size of the swarm as well as the uniformity and unending encroachment of the rodents upon his person. With this moment, the narrator’s utter despair becomes horrifyingly clear, for surely only someone with no other option could ever possibly think to invite this torture upon themself.
