Viewpoints, Monsters, and Language in Two Horror Stories - Essay Example

Horror stories often carry both a sense of the paranormal and the rawness of reality. Poe uses the first person POV to allow readers to understand the narrator’s most intimate thoughts and emotions, while Bierce employs the third person POV to depict an outsider’s view of the events that shaped Murdoch’s gloomy existence; they have similar internal and psychological monsters; and they use POV, diction, and description to develop the horrific atmosphere of paranoia in The Tell-Tale Heart and grief in The Boarded Window.

The Tell-Tale Heart effectively uses the first person point-of-view, because of the importance of knowing the thoughts and emotions of an insane murderer, while Bierce employs the third person point-of-view to portray a fantastic story that Murlock’s morose personality cannot effectively narrate. Poe’s narrator has a disturbed and anxious mind. This cannot be effectively displayed through a third person POV. For instance, the narrator confesses that he is nervous, but he is not mad: “TRUE!

--nervous --very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?” (Poe). He could not have admitted this to another person for fear that he will be reported and brought to an asylum. Bierce, on the contrary, cannot use a first-person perspective, because it is clear that a man like Murdoch is drowned with misery. He is described as: “… tall and spare, with a stoop of the shoulders--a burden bearer” (Bierce).. A person carrying such guilt in his heart can hardly be able to present a decent and engaging story of his life.

These stories have similar internal and psychological monsters. The monster in Poe’s story is the narrator’s mental illness, while Murdoch suffers from psychological guilt. The narrator in The Tell-Tale Heart suffers from an unidentified illness that has made him paranoid and uneasy. He says: “The disease had sharpened my senses --not destroyed --not dulled them” (Poe). His hearing has become “acute,” which must make him very anxious indeed and unable to sleep. Being deprived of sleep, this makes increasingly anxious.

In addition, his illness has made him paranoid, as he claims to hear “all things in the heaven and in the earth” (Poe). As a paranoid man, he also develops an acute sense of hatred for the old man’s “eye of a vulture” (Poe). It is possible that the old man is sick himself with this kind of eye, but instead of understanding this illness, the narrator becomes a monster with fears in his mind. He fears this eye and he kills an innocent and helpless man because of his paranoia. As for The Boarded Window, Murdoch’s inconsolable memory of his oversight on his wife’s death has led him to continue existing, but never living.

The monster inside him is his enormous guilt for not ensuring the welfare of his wife by automatically thinking that she is dead. The fact that she even manages to bite the panther’s ear shows her defiance to death. A while ago, he thinks “Things cannot be so bad as they seem,” but after what happened, thing are as bad as they seem. Poe and Bierce both use POV, diction, and description to develop the horrific atmosphere that is particular to their