THE MOTIF OF SELF-DESTRUCTION IN EDGAR POE’S SHORT STORIES

Abstract

Mental health of a person is an important aspect of his/her life that determines the peculiarities of the person’s worldview and interaction with the world around him/her. Mental health problems have always been relevant, but they become particularly acute in times of crisis or in situations of uncertainty. The life of Ukrainians during the war and the unpredictability of the present contribute to the growth of depressive, ambivalent states and traumatic syndromes, which are becoming increasingly difficult for a person to survive, and, being in a situation of hopelessness and despair, with no chance of the optimistic future, he/she sometimes launches a programme of his/her own selfdestruction. Given this psycho-emotional state of the modern Ukrainian, the study of the motif of self-destruction in the 19th-century American short stories is especially relevant today. The novelistic genre is actively developing in the literature of the United States at the present time, its popularity is due to the rapid and dynamic development of American life. The subject of the study is the work of Edgar Poe, in particular his short story “The Fall of the House of Usher”. The analysis of the self-destructive behaviour of the protagonist Roderick is determined by several factors, especially the peculiarity of his family genealogy, connection with the family estate, and superstition. The writer is also aware of the nature of phobias, the nature of human fears is different, a person can experience fear of loneliness, fear of old age, fear of the future or, like the main character of the short story, fear of death. An important aspect of the American artist’s research is the nature of human fears, which is connected with autobiographical allusions, based on his own spiritual and emotional experience, the writer had to wage a difficult struggle for existence in the atmosphere of commercial civilisation he hated, experiencing similarly complex psycho-emotional states. Edgar Poe’s lifestyle contributed to the creation of his own programme of self-destruction that became the artist’s life credo.