The Human Chair By Edogawa Rampo Analysis - 877 Words

Ryan Hayford Mr. Clapham English II Honors 13 October 2017 Journal 5 – â€Å"The Human Chair† Advertisements Edogawa Rampo must have been a big fan and admirer of Edgar Allen Poe because you can sense that in this story. His writing is clearly influenced by western writers of mystery. â€Å"The Human Chair† is one of suspense and horror and is cleverly crafted in all its psychological creepiness. Poe’s narratives put the reader in the driver’s seat. The reader can never tell if they can trust the narrator or not, or if they are completely insane. The story slowly fills with dread, while conveying a feeling of sadness for a lonely ugly man, a shut-in, who desires only to be touched affectionately by someone. As the layers of the story†¦show more content†¦The narrator sees the gruesome vulture eye, which makes him insane and wanting to take action, â€Å"For it was not the old man I felt I had to kill; it was the eye, his Evil Eye† (Poe 65). In â€Å"The Human Chair,† the reader hears the rustling sounds of unsuspecting sitters, and feels the structure of the people’s bodies who sit upon him. The reader uses their sense of smell to detect what the aroma of a rotting dead corpse and the pungent stench of remnants of a man living in a chair would be like. â€Å"The Human Chair† includes an obsessive psychological component. The narrator has a voyeuristic obsession and decides to spy on a world he cannot be part of, best explained in the following statement, â€Å"As soon as I entered the chair I was swallowed up by complete darkness, and to everyone else in the world I no longer existed!† (Rampo 35) The narrator does not have a real sense of home and place, so he creates his own space. It is a perverted skill in concealing himself from a time, place, and people. Similarly, in â€Å"The Tell-Tale Heart,† the narrator suffered from mental illness and seemed to be completely alone and friendless in the word. One can call into question fiction and reality in both writers’ stories. The whole notion of something to familiar, such as a chair, or an eye being at the root of the horror is common. The narrator has a blurred sense of reality, believing his love affair with the Japanese woman is real,