the right “mood” for the reader. The reader knows that something terrible is going to happen, and therefore has an expectation The language with which he accomplishes this includes the words “human remains”, “vault”, “crypt”, “bones”, “catacombs” etc. These are all words associated with death and dying, and therefore the description takes on a dark, foreboding tone. Although this story is written in the first-person, it could not be deduced from this paragraph. The narration here shows the narrator describing the scene as if from a great distance, using perhaps the clinical detachment that doctors develop to distance themselves from horrifying injuries to their patients. There are no personal pronouns used at all thus there is no link from the scene to the narrator. Considering the horrific nature of what he is about to do to his friend, then it is another plot device that Poe uses to set the tone for the reader. Poe uses the first-person point of view to write the majority of his stories, and all of the stories from which excerpts have been taken were written in this way. This changes the way a reader would look at the descriptions, because they would be coming from someone who is actually in the events, rather than someone who is telling something remote from them. There are many advantages to using the first-person in stories, and these are especially evident when the narrator is required to describe a scene. The first of which I shall speak is allowance for opinion. When humans speak from their own point of view, they undoubtably will give an opinion of some sort, whether it is noticable or not. This is easy to find in three of the four descriptions above. The first three descriptions make use of giving opinion, whereas because of the detached nature of the fourth description, opinion is not a viable tool. In a first-person narrative, opinion could be as simple...
