opinion as to why it might appear as it does. He does, however, have the narrator comment on the reason why his “door was always open”. He does so in brackets, though, so as not to appear to detract from the descriptive nature of the paragraph. Poe’s attention to detail in this paragraph is minute as per usual. Poe puts a lot of irrelevant information into his descriptions. For instance, in the paragraph above, the phrase “never locked even at night”. Never locked means just that: never locked. There was no need to qualify whether the door was locked at night or not, because if was never locked, then obviously it wouldn’t be locked at night. Of course it could be argued that the implication here is that a reader might think that it was obvious to lock a door at night. This in my opinion is a false argument. Without the mention that the door was not locked at night, a reader would not be likely to think that it should be, because the thought would not come to mind without the suggestion. The next excerpt is from “The Cask of Amontillado”: At the most remote end of the crypt there appeared another less spacious. Its walls had been lined with human remains, piled to the vault overhead, in the fashion of the great catacombs of Paris. Three sides of this interior crypt were still ornamented in this manner. From the fourth side the bones had been thrown down, and lay promiscuously upon the earth, forming at one point a mound of some size. Within the wall thus exposed by the displacing of the bones, we perceived a still interior crypt or recess, in depth about four feet, in width three, in height six or seven. It seemed to have been constructed for no especial use within itself, but formed merely the interval between two of the colossal supports of the roof of the catacombs, and was backed by one of their circumscribing walls of solid granite. This description is deliberately graphic so as to set...
