“The Premature Burial” (1844), a horror story written by the master of horror, Edgar Allan Poe, tells the story of a man who is so obsessed with being buried alive that he constructs an elaborate plan to prevent it from happening. Being buried alive was a common fear at that time, and this story played right into public interest.
As the story begins, the narrator mentions a few disasters in history and wonders about the shadowy boundary between death and life. He notes that there are instances in which a person may appear to be dead, but is not. If a person is buried under the illusion that he or she is dead, that person may wake later to find escape impossible.
From here, he outlines several situations in which this had occurred. In one, a congressman’s wife was buried after an illness. Three days later, the tomb was opened to place another body inside, and they found her hanging by the door. In another, a woman was buried by her husband. Another man who was in love with her dug her up to get a lock of her hair, and her eyes opened. In another, a soldier fell off his horse and seemed to die. When they buried him, someone felt the ground move. They dug him up and tried to revive him, but he died when they shocked him with a galvanized battery.
After these examples, the author expresses his fear of being buried alive. He claims that these occurrences frequently happen without anyone knowing what is happening or how often they happen. The narrator suffers from a strange illness much like death, catalepsy, in which he falls into a deathlike trance. He is afraid that someday someone will mistake this trance for death, because as his disease progresses, the trance becomes longer. In fact, the last time he fell into this trance, it was for a few weeks.
He cannot imagine what would have happened if one of his family or friends had found him in that condition. He obsesses about death and about what might happen if he were buried alive. To fight off these fears, he tries to avoid falling asleep, but his eyes close of their own will on occasion. Once when this happens, a ghastly figure visits him, and we presume it is death.
This inner fear haunts the narrator so much that he is afraid to leave his house. He renovates his family vault so that it can open from the inside and includes adequate ventilation. He makes a spring loaded cover for his coffin, and attaches a bell to the top of the tomb that can be rung by a long rope that rests inside.
Despite all this, the narrator wakes up one day in total darkness. He believes he has been buried alive as he cannot see and there is a weight on his chest. A heavy wooden cover sits six inches from his face, and his jaw appears to have been tied up as is customary to do with the dead. He cannot find the rope to ring the bell, and he realizes that he must have fallen into a trance somewhere away from home.
He is finally able to cry out and is answered. The men who find him remind him that while on a hunting trip, he sought shelter from the rain in a small boat and he is still there. The handkerchief was around his face because he did not have a night cap and the wood was merely the boat. He had not fallen into a trance at all but rather had slept a full night.
This experience changes the narrator’s entire way of thinking. It makes him realize that it is useless to live in fear and that he cannot allow such thoughts to drive his existence. His catalepsy disappears, leading him to believe that it was all a projection of his paranoia.
At the end of the story, the narrator reminds us that the human mind can be dark, and unexplored fears will consume us. We must not dwell on such things for fear of driving ourselves mad. Although human experience is dark, we have to learn to put these concerns away to live before death comes to take us.
The general subject matter of being buried alive was something that captured the audience of that time’s fears and attention. Poe plays on this fear by reminding them first that we do not understand everything there is to know about illness, and that there have been times when people have been buried alive. This would have sparked a deep fear in the audience who was only just beginning to understand the science of life and death.
The true fear of the story is that of obsession and the way our fears take control of our mind and behavior. We find out at the end of the story that his catalepsy was likely caused by the growing fear and paranoia he had at the thought of being buried alive. His mind was sabotaging him.
The story is one of horror at the circumstances, but also horror at the darkness of the human mind. It took the narrator feeling as if his worst fear had come true to realize that it was all in his mind and that while the human experience is a dark one, it should not prevent us from living for what little time we have.
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