In almost all of Poe's works, death is a central issue. Whether a tale of murder, a tale of horror, a Gothic horror romance, or an allegory, Poe's stories, by nature of his preferred genres, are full of death. Though many of his stories deal with either the murder of someone, the solving of a murder, or the supernatural resurrection of someone who has died, it is his allegorical look at mortality, The Masque of the Red Death, which most clearly sums up Poe's themes of death. MS. Found in a Bottle" is an 1833 short story. The unnamed narrator opens the story by telling that he's a jerky jerk from Jerksville. His family hates him, he couldn't care less about his country, and his primary hobby seems to be reading works of German philosophy just so he can point out mistakes in their arguments. Naturally, he heads to sea, where rude comments and surly dismissal of humanity goes with the turf, or surf, as it were. He finds himself on a trading ship in the South Seas, pulled there by a nameless sense of the heebie-jeebies. His nerves prove well founded when he spots a cloud on the horizon, which soon turns into a hurricane. The storm blows the crew overboard, but the ship stays afloat, now populated only by the narrator and an old Swedish sailor who showed up right before the ship left port. Enjoy free online English audiobook “MS. Found in a Bottle”, breathtaking story by Edgar Allan Poe.
