Poe's favorite theme, his obsession; almost all of his tales and poems have variations of this theme. Poe inflicts death and the fear of the unknown on his audience. What lies beyond the grave or in the mind inspires Poe. Other than Poe, no American writer continuously deals on the subject, digs so deeply into it, and involves himself in the doings of death. Throughout Poe’s life, he makes a continuous decent into the Maelstrm: a slow, relentless, downward spiral through the void which lay claim to him forty years into his life. In Poe’s tales, “you cross wasted lands…and you catch a sight of lugubrious feudal buildings suggestive of horrible and mysterious happenings” (Unger 414). Usually, in his tales of terror and death, ghastly occurrences take place under the light of a blood-red moon.“ ‘Fantasy,’ E.M. Forester has said, ‘implies the supernatural, but need not express it’ ” (Stern 55). To many, the ultimate fantasy involves a ghost or some other apparition. Poe never writes a “ghost story”, oddly enough. A ghost, in the sense that we ordinarily think of one, never appears in Poe’s writings. Poe’s characters, “…are not spectral visions but the resuscitated dead who rise from the tomb to confront the living with their…flesh” (Stern 55). Poe, nevertheless, creates characters that have no real existence. Poe has two main personalities: the hardworking editor, intellectual critic, the respectable citizen, and “the disreputable fellow, who frequented low dives and who often wound up literally in the gutter” (Stern 55). Poe makes present the outcome of the lifelong struggle between his two warring selves in “William Wilson”. In this story, William Wilson represents Poe. This tale tells the most about Poe and gives its audience the greatest insight into the workings of Poe’s mind. ...
