Summary

The short story “The Premature Burial” by Edgar Allan Poe opens with the unnamed narrator describing the thrill people feel whenever they hear of great tragedies happening in real life. He states that in fiction such extreme cases would be thought of as tasteless. 

Then he mentions the topic of burial while alive as one of the most terrifying of tragedies. He claims that, because the mechanism of death is still largely unknown, the boundary between life and death is also vague. As a result, many cases of premature burial exist. The narrator then proceeds to describe several such instances and concludes that cases of premature burial take place much more frequently than it is commonly believed.

The narrator confesses that he has been suffering from something similar to catalepsy for ...