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“It lay in a remote turret of the building. Its decorations were rich, yet tattered and antique. Its walls were hung with tapestry and bedecked with manifold and multiform armorial trophies, together with an unusually great number of very spirited modern paintings in frames of rich golden arabesque.”

This quote is part of the story’s expositional first paragraph and describes the bedroom that serves as the setting for the events of the remainder of the story. It is significant that the narrator chooses to spend the night in this strange, dark, and isolated place. The narrator’s choice here, and the bedroom setting itself, demonstrate the narrator’s attraction to the Gothic and a predilection to isolation and deep introspection. Additionally, the bedroom symbolizes the narrator’s own psyche, which is complicated, unusual, and filled with imagery and art.

“In these paintings, which depended from the walls not only in their main surfaces, but in very many nooks which the bizarre architecture of the chateau rendered necessary ….” 

This quote expands upon the story’s exposition and occurs just after the narrator has established himself in the bedroom of one of the chateau’s turrets. The narrator’s description evokes a sense of strangeness and “wrongness” in the interior of the chateau. Despite this creepiness, or even because of it, the narrator relishes the opportunity to spend his night studying the bedroom’s many paintings.

“I bade Pedro to close the heavy shutters of the room—since it was already night—to light the tongues of a tall candelabrum which stood by the head of my bed—and to throw open far and wide the fringed curtains of black velvet which enveloped the bed itself.”

This quote concludes the story’s exposition. The fact that the narrator thus curates this particular setting for the rest of the story reveals his obsession with art and critical thinking. If the narrator, who is badly wounded and desperately in need of sleep, valued his health above all, he would have chosen to close the velvet curtains and keep the candelabra unlit. Instead, he bids Pedro to do the opposite, revealing his obsessive love for consuming and reveling in works of art.

Next section The Power of Art

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