Edgar Allan Poe is remembered as one of the most amazing writers of all time. He has written many stories that have actually became extremely popular. To me, it quite seems as if his writing is much more about life and death, but it still interesting. “Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre” (Wikipedia, 2011). Two of his stories are very similar; “Ligeia” and “The Tell- Tale Heart” both are about death. Things that these stories have in common are that both narrators murder somebody close to them and after the crime, the murdered person haunts them. Both stories caught my attention because Poe really gave enough detail, that way the reader understands what is going on. Although the stories were astonishing, and well-detailed, Poe still tried to get the reader to think about why the narrator did it or what was going through their mind. As I read each story, I became more and more interested to know what will happen next or how will it end. I liked the fact that Poe as well as making the reader interested, he makes the reader somehow doubt the narrator’s true feelings. For example, in “Ligeia”, the narrator has his own wife named Ligeia, unfortunately, she dies of illness, after a while he remarries his second wife, Rowena, which then also becomes ill and as well as Ligeia, Rowena dies. To some it could be simply a coincidence that both wives died of the same illness, but to others including me, the climax of the story might seem as if the own narrator, which is both women’s husband, murdered his own wives. Therefore, it becomes hard to trust the narrator due to the fact that he murdered his own wives intentionally. Poe included in the story that the narrator consumed a drug that always made him feel high which caused him to sometimes hallucinate and see things. The drug was called “opium” which is somewhat related to heroine, causing the narrator to always feel drugged and after the death of his second wife Rowena, he somehow hallucinated by seeing her body come back to life and becoming Ligeia. The ending might confused some readers, but the truth is that the narrator experienced that only because of the side effects of opium. In the other story, “The Tell-Tale Heart”, it is also about the narrator murdering a person. The only difference to me in both stories was that in this one, the narrator explains with full detail how it all happens; to the night while it was planned all through the night of the incident and after. As well as “Ligeia”, it seems as if neither one of the narrators can be trusted because they both took care and had no hate at all towards the people murdered. The narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart”, kills an old man because of his eye which he has in a bad condition. After killing the old man, the narrator somehow chops the body into pieces and puts them underneath the wooden floor. Moments later, police officers come by due to a complaint; after not noticing anything out of the ordinary, the cops stay a while for a drink. As more time passed by, the narrator became nervous and started hallucinating the sound of the old man’s heart beating. “When police come to investigate, the narrator offers a confession,
