Conclusion

Among Poe's locations, the house stands as the most important. It is not merely the place people inhabit. There is a clear relationship between the house and the narrators' minds. This has been explained in terms of Freudian and Jungian theories (Bonaparte, Wilbur, and Knapp). The house is a symbol of the mind. As such, it may be understandable that the rooms may symbolize the brain's different areas and functions. Within the house, the library has particular importance. The library, so critical in Poe's fantastic fiction, represents the imaginative function of the human mind. In "Berenice," a story pervaded by the dreamy atmosphere of unreality and imagination, the narrator spends a large part of his life in the library, as he admits. Roderick Usher, the protagonist in "The Fall of the House of Usher," owns a library with a large number of books of fiction. He has not been in the open air for a long time, implying that his life experience is almost exclusively fed by such a room. These two are basically melancholic characters. Others, such as those in "The Black Cat" and "The Tell-Tale Heart," do not mention the library. Instead of an imagination stimulated by a room full of books, their madness is provoked by a cat and an old man's eye. In these two cases, the fantastic does not come from fancy as it was understood during the Romantic period. This poses the question of the power of imagination regarding fantastic fiction. Poe seems to be theorizing and practicing the limits of imagination. His insistence on some rational cause to explain the fantastic seems to indicate that he no longer believes in supernatural theories of the fantastic. At the same time his use of enclosed locations as the appropriate setting for the fantastic seems to point toward a psychological explanation, which is reinforced by the manic character of his narratives.

There are other stories, such as "Ms. Found in a Bottle" and "A Descent into the Maelstrom," located aboard ships at sea. Curiously enough, these stories do not have a psychological explanation for the fantastic. Instead, they are models of mastery in the creation of fantastic short fiction through skilled writing. However, they are distanced from Poe's other stories, since they do not propose a psychological cause to the fantastic. This is quite interesting, as "Ms. Found in a Bottle" was written in a very early stage of his career, probably when he was still hesitant to write about the fantastic. Poe did not, however, leave the psychological totally aside in the story; the narrator mentions opium: "We had also on board coir, jaggeree, ghee, cocoa-nuts, and a few cases of opium". "A Descent into the Maelstrom" is another example of Poe's interest in science as the source of the fantastic. It was also written at an early stage in his career. In the story, there is no hint of a psychological cause. It is in fact a sort of scientific riddle that makes the fantastic function.

The new fantastic, that is the fantastic as practiced by Poe, needed a narrator whose focus was tightly centered on a single event or character. The tight focus was thought of as a means to achieve the unity of effect that is characteristic of the modern short story. Poe examined the ratiocinative method in mystery and science fiction, which simply parallels the psychological aspects of fantastic stories since they all come from the same poetics of the story. Naturally, this implies that Poe had in mind the same ideas for his stories, no matter how they fell into one category or another.