Analysis Of The Monkey's Paw By W. Jacobs

W.W Jacobs once said, “Be careful what you wish for, you may receive it”. Horror is a genre that seeks to elicit a negative emotional reaction from viewers by playing on their fears. “The Monkey’s Paw” falls perfectly in this genre. “The Monkey’s Paw” is a horror story written by W.W Jacobs. In the story,the monkey’s paw grants three wishes to three different people.

The key was fate in both of the stories, however, the paw in “The monkey’s Paw” symbolized faith and when it moved around in Sergeant Major Morris’s hand manipulating the fate for there wantings. The fate in

"The world is made up of two classes-the hunters, and the huntees.” This short story written by Richard Connell, “The Most Dangerous Game,” contains many literary devices that make a story come alive. In this specific short story, conflict, plot, and suspense are used to push the story forward. Connell's way of using these three specific elements keeps the reader attentive, and creates a memory for the reader of an incredible short story. First, conflict is the struggle between opposing forces is shown in many ways throughout the story.

Cisneros’s language in “The Monkey Garden” is similar to the language used in Genesis as they both include tempted characters and banishment. When reading these similar lines, Cisneros’s message in “The Monkey Garden” suggests that significant turning points in life are inevitable. “The Monkey Garden” and Genesis contain tempted characters who make the improper decisions: Sally and Eve want to commit actions that identify as irresponsible and unavoidable. In “The Monkey Garden” Tito and his friends persuade Sally when they tell her, “ you can’t get the keys back unless you kiss us and Sally pretend[s]to be mad at first but she [says] yes.

In John Steinbeck’s novel “Of Mice and Men”, symbolism is a crucial factor to understanding and addressing different themes or topics the story talks about and make them more manageable, but also to engage readers. The author uses different symbols such as animals, characters, and places to portray the themes of dreams, innocence, loneliness, friendship, the American Dream, the weak and the strong, among others. Without understanding these key symbols readers probably wouldn’t understand the context of the story or what the author wants to express, making it very boring when reading it. Definitely, these symbols give a deeper meaning to the story, which could be also described as an allegory.

As an author, Stephen King has developed the skill of alluring writing. Stephen King’s word choice is not common, but eccentric and assists in making a story enticing to read. Alike Stephen King, W.W Jacobs also uses quality word choice and descriptive adjectives for his stories, one of them is “The Monkey’s Paw.” In “The Monkey’s Paw” W.W Jacobs uses word choice and descriptive adjectives to develop the theme.

However, when he made his second wish, “...he regarded it

In both the short stories they use similar sentence structure to convey madness. In “The Tell-Tale Heart” Poe does this by short sentences and frequent skips, for example when he writes this: ““True!- nervous- very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses- not destroyed- not dulled them” (Poe 670). The jumpiness creates a sense of confusion and disturbs the reader which furthers the authors point. In the literary analysis on “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Janice Haney-Peritz analyzes Gilman’s short story.

The mood of the story, The Monkey 's Paw, is eerie. The aura of eerie is created by the author 's use of third person point of view, indirect characterization,direct characterization, suspense as well as diction throughout the story The Monkey 's Paw is written in third person point of view. This allows the reader to know more of what is happening than the characters and also allows the reader to remain distant from the characters by knowing more of the circumstances than the characters.

Invisible Fear Franklin Delanor Roosevelt once said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”. He implies fear as something dangerous. In the novel Lord of the Flies, William Golding proposes fear comes from within, but human inclination is to run and hide because they are afraid of the unknown. The author suggests that although fear feels paralyzing, the situation is rarely as threatening as one first assumes. Golding uses children’s fear on a remote island to prove that often the thing that is dreaded most comes from one’s mind.

People are often told not to judge a book by it’s cover, although they do anyways. However, by only referencing the surface of the book, a person misses out on the deeper moral of the story. In the analysis, “What Is the Horror Genre?” written by Sharon A. Russell, it explains that the true definition of the horror genre is deeper than the stereotype of just looking at the surface of paranormal activities, and that it includes phenomenons behind it. Sharon included different elements that can be used to evaluate stories to be in the horror genre. They are supernatural world, parallel world, suspense, setting, and the source of the horror.

“Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality”-Edgar Allan Poe. All great horror stories represent that quote. There is one story that does not. “The Monkey’s Paw” by W.W. Jacobs is not a horror story because there is not a monster, it is not believable, and it does not have a creepy setting. Classic horror stories usually have some sort of a monster in it, whether the monster is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or Frankenstein.

Life is not always the easiest thing to deal with so if you could cheat at life, would you? With that being said in the stories by W.W. Jacobs and Edgar Allan Poe: The Monkey's Paw and The Tell-Tale Heart, characters are faced with problems that may lead to a lifetime of misery. In the Monkey’s Paw, an innocent life is taken simply of the greed of a person. Contrary, in the Tell Tale Heart, life is taken because of the physical appearance of an old man, particularly, his eye.

“If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there'd be peace.” - John Lennon. John Lennon said this because the world focuses too much on what they want instead of looking at what we already have and what we really need. The stories “The Necklace” and “The Monkey’s Paw” share the theme of materialism. In both stories, the main characters learn about materialism and how what they have may not make them worse off than better.

Many stories have messages that make readers reflect upon their actions. “The Monkey’s Paw” is one of these stories. It contains several messages which One of the messages in “The Monkey’s Paw” is that fate should not be tampered with. This message is clearly stated in the story: “He wanted to show that fate ruled people’s lives, and that those who interfered with it did so to their sorrow.” Various details in the story give support to this message and serve as examples to the reader of the consequences that may occur from disturbing fate.