The Premature Burial

“The Premature Burial” reflect the terror that the characters suffer from and lead them to be isolated from the society. The use of the single effect in Poe’s short stories supports the structure and the actions in the story.

The use of the words ” premature, horror, interments, buried while alive, entombment” and others support the overall atmosphere, which is full of fear and terror from being not dead yet but buried.According to John Kitterman “The Premature Burial” is a story that “presents the experience of being buried alive from the first-person point of view”,The unnamed narrator suffers from the horror of being buried alive. As he says “To be buried while alive is, beyond question, the most terrific of these extremes which has ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality”(357). According to John Snart the narrator believes premature interments are commonplace.From the beginning of the story the narrator starts to tell the reader about some events that show the human sufferings because of the premature burials. Those events and his illness keep the narrator’s life full of fear and terror from being buried alive. “Fearful indeed the suspicion –but more fearful the doom!.

It may be asserted, without hesitation, that no event is no terribly well adapted to inspire the supremeness of bodily and of mental distress, as is burial before death”.The narrator shows his fear not only from the premature entombment, but also from the suffering that he would face inside the grave while trying to get out. Moreover, he starts to describe the atmosphere inside the tomb and the presence of the “Conquror worm” and the things that keeps him torrified from being in grave while alive. According to Freud the interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious. The narrator beleives that most of the buried people are victims of premature burials, and those beleives are repressed