Change is an aspect of life that often frightens people. Likewise, the very thought of death worries most people because it is a permanent change that we know so little about experiencing. “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” by Edgar Allen Poe is a fictional article that was published in 1845 in a newspaper and presented to seem like a true story. This short story contains aspects of sadness, suffering, and death. The use of imagery and parallels to Poe’s life in “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” function to convey the overall theme of the inevitability of death.

In the article, M. Valdemar has contracted tuberculosis and agreed for his friend (the narrator) to mesmerize him in his dying state. Mesmerization is when a mesmerist uses animal magnetism in attempt of putting a patient into a trance or hypnosis. During the time that Poe wrote “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” his mother had recently died of tuberculosis and his wife had just contracted it. Poe knew that his wife would likely die soon due to the tuberculosis. The parallel in the story that M. Valdemar contracts this disease and knows he is unquestionably going to die shows that Poe knew that he needed to accept the fact that he could not do anything about his wife’s condition.

Poe used vivid imagery to depict M. Valdemar’s grotesque and dead-like physical condition. He was described as having a yellowish and repulsive smelling fluid flowing from under his eyelids while the rest of his body lay pale and rigid. His face and jaw did not move when he talked from his “swollen and blackened” tongue, which looked and sounded awfully dreadful. His voice was so terrifying that when he replied to the narrator’s questions, the nurses that were observing scampered from the room immediately and the student, who was taking notes on the event, passed out. 

Poe’s uses of imagery in this passage show a parallel between his life and the story. M. Valdemar is dead on the outside and alive on the inside. Poe could have been using this as an example of how he felt dead on the inside even though he was alive on the outside. When the narrator awoke M. Valdemar from the mesmeric trance, Valdemar began chanting “Dead! Dead” and he decomposed and shriveled up into a “nearly liquid pile of loathsome” (73). This death was depicted using significantly horrific and disturbing imagery which suits the style of Poe’s writing, but it also goes to show that he was possibly trying to dwell on worse deaths that could happen so that when his wife passed he could have one thing to be thankful for: that his wife died a more respectable death than M. Valdemar experienced.

Poe expressed the theme of suffering in the story by vivid imagery of Valdemar’s physical condition and exclamations of words and horrid sounds that he ejects. “Yes; asleep now. Do not wake me! – let me die so!” I here felt the limbs and found them as rigid as ever. The right arm, as before, obeyed the direction of my hand. I questioned the sleep-walker again: “Do you still feel pain in the breast, M. Valdemar?” The answer was now immediate, but even less audible than before: “No pain – I am dying.” (70) Even though Valdemar says he is feeling no physical pain, he is suffering by being kept between life and death. He is a physical catastrophe and should be dead by now but he is still trapped inside his body and this is why he tells the narrator not to wake him and to let him die. It was not a physical suffering; it was a mental suffering. A parallel to Poe’s life because he was suffering mentally from the situation he was in. He was not feeling physical pain but he was suffering on the inside from the loss he was about to experience as well as the losses he had already faced from his mother passing. Poe could have also been expressing how he thought his wife was feeling. Perhaps she had accepted death from tuberculosis like M. Valdemar had or perhaps she was going through the mental suffering of knowing that she would soon have to leave her husband alone in the world. Using the idea of mental suffering in the story contributes to the theme of the inevitability of death because death causes mental suffering from grieving in many cases.

Poe realized that as much as he did not want to lose his wife, he had to accept that there was nothing he could do. He had to overcome his fear of the unknown and eternal change that was causing his mental suffering. Fate is an inescapable force and when people attempt to run away from it, it ends up coming back and taking its toll. Poe used this story as a form of self-help while stuck in a hard place. 

Poe needed a way to cope with the fact that he was going to lose his wife to the same awful disease that took his mother, brother, and step mother away from him. The theme of this short story contained aspects of sadness, suffering, and death. More specifically, the theme was focused on the terrifying inevitability of death. This is an existing fear of a permanent change of which we have no experience and cannot really begin to comprehend. We can obtain from Poe’s short story that death and its perpetual effects are an inevitable part of life. Poe used the imagery and parallels in “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” and his life to contribute to the theme that death is inevitable.
