Much sympathy was, of course, exercised in my behalf, and as no one made claim to my corpse, it was ordered that I should be interred in a public vault.

Here, after due interval, I was deposited. The sexton departed, and I was left alone. A line of Marston’s “Malcontent” —Death’s a good fellow and keeps open house —struck me at that moment as a palpable lie.

I knocked off, however, the lid of my coffin, and stepped out. The place was dreadfully dreary and damp, and I became troubled with ennui. By way of amusement, I felt my way among the numerous coffins ranged in order around. I lifted them down, one by one, and breaking open their lids, busied myself in speculations about the mortality within.

“This,” I soliloquized, tumbling over a carcass, puffy, bloated, and rotund — “this has been, no doubt, in every sense of the word, an unhappy — an unfortunate man. It has been his terrible lot not to walk but to waddle — to pass through life not like a human being, but like an elephant — not like a man, but like a rhinoceros.

            From “Loss of Breath,” by Edgar Allan Poe

           Edgar Allan Poe uses black humor so that we envision the dreaded scene of being pronounced dead and waking up in the middle of coffins.   With its punctilious tempo, little by little, he takes the reader where he wants, his brilliant prose unveiling the futility of our existence since we all end up as deformed corpses.