The Oblong Wood Box

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Edgar Allen Poe has a natural talent for placing fear and doubt into his reader's mind. He presents a number of very obvious details, forcing his reader’s mind into thinking that the story goes in one direction while, at the same time, sprinkles smaller details in the story to throw the reader’s mind off track. Poe wants his readers minds to gather the facts throughout the tale and come to a conclusion. A few of the facts are so minimal, the reader tends to dismiss them as irrelevant to the main story. In "The Oblong Box,” the mention of “...a strong, disagreeable, ...,a peculiarly disgusting odor” turns out to be one of the most important clues to the contents of the irregular pine wood box.
Poe starts this story by telling his readers that he will be taking a …show more content…
Wyatt, he is confused; he describes the woman that he sees as “a plain-looking woman. If not positively ugly, she was not, I think, very far from it.” Later, she is described as “...rather indifferent-looking, totally uneducated, and decidedly vulgar.” Poe concludes that Cornelius had been trapped into this marriage because this woman is undeniably below the standards that Cornelius would have chosen freely. Later, Poe discovers that Mrs. Wyatt leaves his friend's state-room and sleeps alone in the empty room, returning to Mr. Wyatt's room early the next morning. Poe assumes this is the sign of a pending divorce.
During two nights that Poe found hard to sleep, strange noises were coming from Cornelius’ room. After listening for awhile, Poe decides that part of the sounds were made by Cornelius prying open the pine box. He could then distinguish the noises of the lid being removed and laid on the empty berth. “After this there was a dead stillness.” Poe remembers “imagining” the sounds of “low sobbing, or murmuring sounds.” He decided that this was his own imagination taking over in the long hours. Shortly before daybreak, he would hear the sounds of the lid being replaced on the
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