Hanuman's Essay on The Premature Burial By Edgar Allen Poe

Imaginary Burials

In “The Premature Burial,” Edgar Allen Poe explores the theme of imagination. Whether because we are dreaming, ill, beguiled by tricks, or under the influence of drugs or medication, what we perceive is not always real, and we can become very fearful of imaginary things. The terror experienced by the narrator of the story shows that the mind is often stronger than we think. The narrator’s mental state is not rational, because rather than perceiving reality for what it is, he saw his surroundings in a small sloop’s cabin as a coffin, and he panicked at the thought of being buried alive. Specific story elements such as the dark, close, and confined setting in both the coffin in the narrator’s perceived reality as well as in the sloop’s cabin in his reality inspire fear and foreboding. In paragraph two, Poe builds suspense with this darkness, and the narrators feeling of being unable to move, being trapped, while those around him move freely and separately from himself. The men on the ship, while not comforting, still provided immense relief as they show that the coffin is not real, but just a figment of imagination. The coffin represents imagination or hallucination, and the characters such as the men on the ship represent our reality, true, not always pleasant, but very much real, helping the narrator to gain a sense of balance upon awakening after what he perceives to be his burial. Both the setting and symbolism are essential in developing the theme because they show the contrast between the dark unknown and surrealism of the man’s imagination against the reality of the trip on the boat.

The theme in “The Premature Burial” is very similar to that of ­“A Telltale Heart”, another story by Poe. Both stories involve the character’s mind tricking itself into believing something unreal and dreamlike, even while awake. The narrator of “The Telltale Heart” is different than that of “The Premature Burial” because he is by far more mad, and his madness led him to murder an old man, after which he believes he can hear the man’s heart beating under the floorboards where he hid the body. So it is not himself being buried alive that he fears, but the old man. Of course, the beating is not real, but imaginary. This all ties into the theme of mind overpowering reality, and in both stories, Poe uses themes of fear, death, despair, madness, entrapment, and imagination. While in “The Telltale Heart” the protagonist actually committed terrifying acts, which consume his mind, in “The Premature Burial,” the terror is not at all real, and entirely in his mind, but it is just as frightening nonetheless.