Customer Reviews

Poe's Short Stories (Cliffs Notes)

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I had to read "Fall of the House of Usher" for my English 11A class, and when we started I was beyond lost. This really explained things, and made it possible for me to excel on the topic. I normally don't go for this sort of thing, but I took the chance, thinking, what would it hurt? It worked!

I am already predisposed against Cliffs Notes simply because of my belief that they contribute to what Allan Bloom calls, "The Closing of the American Mind". Using Cliffs Notes to understand literature is comparable to taking a Polaroid photo of the Mona Lisa to hang in your living room. However, I was in a bookstore and started wondering how bad these Cliffs Notes really were so I started skimming through the one which purports to analyze Poe's short stories since I have read these several dozen times. The result was worse than I expected. My aversion to Cliffs Notes had, heretofore, been that it felt like cheating but I had always assumed the details were as least accurate. What I found was that the "facts" were just plain wrong and thousands of lazy students would never even realize it.

For example, on page 54 of the Cliffs Notes is the following quote from the discussion of "The Cask of Amontillado": "Earlier, he [Montresor] had let all of the servants off for the night..."

No, he did not. In fact, Montresor specifically told them not to leave as is evident from the lines in the actual Poe text:

There were no attendants at home; they had absconded to make merry in honour of the time. I had told them that I should not return until the morning and had given them explicit orders not to stir from the house. These orders were sufficient, I well knew, to insure their immediate disappearance , one and all, as soon as my back was turned.

Then the editor goes on to explain an exchange between Fortunato and Montresor regarding the Free Masons just after Fortunato had made an enigmatic gesture with the De Grave bottle:

Cliffs Notes: "At this point Fortunato was sure that Montresor didn't understand the gesture..."

Actual Text of Poe: I broke and reached him a flagon of De Grave... He laughed and threw the bottle upwards with a gesticulation I did not understand. I looked at him in surprise. He repeated the movement -- a grotesque one. "You do not comprehend?" he said. "Not I," I replied. "Then you are not of the brotherhood."

Cliffs Notes: "...[Free Masonry], an order that Fortunato was certain Montresor couldn't belong to."

Clearly, Fortunato was not certain, at first, that Montresor was not a Mason for he repeated the gesture. Only after Montresor admits to not knowing the sign does Fortunato realize this. Yet the Cliffs Notes editor claims this is another example of Fortunato attempting to insult Montresor.

Finally, this line from page 56 of the Cliffs Notes is an absurd mistake: "Fortunato then showed him a sign of the masons - a trowel which he brought with him".

But as the actual text shows it is Montresor (the narrator), not Fortunato, who has the trowel: "It is this," I answered, producing a trowel from beneath the folds of my roquelaire. "You jest," [Fortunato] exclaimed, recoiling a few paces. "But let us proceed to the Amontillado." "Be it so," [Montresor] said, replacing the tool beneath the cloak

I was not inclined to read any further to see if the editor was equally maladroit with the facts in the other short stories since my poor opinion of Cliffs Notes had already been confirmed. Poe probably has the most precise use of the English language of any American writer and deserves better treatment. It is intellectually lazy to make such sophomoric mistakes and a disservice to those who naively depend on Cliffs Notes for accurate information.

I used these Cliffs Notes to review for a test, and they were extremely helpful and in-depth enough to refresh my memory on some of Poe's short stories. However, if one attempts to use these Cliffs Notes without having read Poe's stories, he or she will become completely lost. Because the descriptions of each story skip around a lot (they keep jumping from events that occurred at the beginning of the story to ones that happened at the end of the story), it becomes rather confusing for one who has never read the story to follow the sequential events of the plot without getting lost. When I used these Notes for the purpose of reviewing, however, I found that they adequately refreshed my memory enough so that I did not have to read the entire stories again.