The three stories to be discussed in this essay are “The Bouquet” by Charles W. Chesnutt, “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and “Gimpel the Fool” by Isaac Bashevis Singer. It’s interesting to dissect these pieces of literature to see how they reflect the time period they were written in, by whom they were written, and if the stories they read have any abnormalities outside what is expected.
The short story “A Rose for Emily” written by William Faulkner describes the life of woman filled with loneliness and fanatic love. The plot depicts the protagonist in the surrounding after the death of her father. Emily refuses to accept this fact, but after a while manages to recover and create relationships with Homer Barron. Nevertheless, when she understands that chances of marriage are too miserable, Emily buys arsenic, poisons her fiance and live with the corpse till the end of her life in the room frozen in time. The essay will discuss various types of tropes in the story and explain surrealism, irony, imagery, symbolism and alienation examples used by the author.
The first paragraph of any story is arguably the most important element. It should capture the attention of the reader, as well as begin to develop the most important elements of the story. Ralph Ellison’s captivating introduction paragraph for “King of the Bingo Game”, is an emotionally involved depiction of a nameless African American man who was a member of the United States Black Migration from South to North. Written in an indirectly detailed style and strewn with images evoking pathetic feelings, this passage is key in characterizing the main character and snatches the attention of the audience. Ellison’s use of changes in point of view and use of allusions subtly communicates
“Contents of the Dead Man’s Pocket” by Jack Finney is an excellent short story. Finney’s main character, Tom Benecke, is an ambitious young man married to Claire, tom spends a lot of his free time working rather than with her. One evening while Tom is alone , working, a valuable piece of paper flies out the window. He makes the terrible decision to go out on the ledge after the piece of paper, and a nerve-wracking adventure ensues. The three most important literary elements to “Contents of the Dead Man’s Pocket” are external conflict, internal conflict, and suspense.
Throughout the story, three major details of the narrator’s psyche are confirmed. First, we learned of the narrator’s deceitfulness. Every morning he lies to the old man with the least bit of guilt. The next continues to prove the madness as the narrator feels utter joy from the terror of another. Lastly, the narrator fabricates that the old man is simply not home to assure the officers. Readers may question Poe’s choice of a mentally unstable narrator. Though the narrator is clearly proven mad, his descriptions intensify the story greatly. It gives the tale purpose and proposes a captivating plot. A narrator: it is now made debatable if readers will ever have entire trust in another after Edgar Allan Poe’s remarkable
Modern artists today generally use images of physical and mental illness in literature. In The Tell-Tale Heart and The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe, both short stories show the usage of illness, madness, and fear. The narrators in both stories try to convince the readers that the characters are physically and mentally ill. Edgar Allen Poe creates these vivid characters which successfully assist the building of plot and ideas. Poe demonstrates how a person’s inner turmoil and terror can lead to insanity through illustrative language.
Poe’s stories “Cask of Amontillado” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” display the dark romantic theme of a man’s soul by the development of the setting, plot, and characterization. As both stories begin, the initial device used to advance the theme is setting, which remains grim and sinister throughout the duration of both stories. Accompanying these physical details is the plot, each of which includes the murder of an innocent man. Most notably, the characterization of each piece’s narrator allows the audience to fully understand their internal struggle and its final resolution. While “Cask of Amontillado” contains an overall intriguing and unexpected plot as well as setting, the narrator’s characterization proves this story to conclude in a less
Obsession is the control of one's thoughts or feelings by an idea or desire. Dark Romantic authors have used and portrayed the idea of obsession in their works to convey strong senses, emotions, and feelings. The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a perfect example of a woman's thoughts controlling her life in every way possible. In the story The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allen Poe, the narrator’s obsession with an object leads them to commit a cold hearted murder. Both stories depict the theme of obsession because the characters are fixated on their own thoughts and desires than on reality itself.
There are times in life where people do commit a small mistake, or a huge crime, but what really matters is if one will listen to their conscience. In “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe, the main character lives with an old man who has an eye that “resembled that of a vulture--a pale blue eye, with a film over it.” The story revolves around the main character’s obsession over the eye, and how he got rid of it-- by murdering the old man. Towards the end of the story, the young man confesses to the police about his insane stunt after they searched his house. In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Edgar Allan Poe focused on having the reader know more than the secondary character, using description, and using a first-person narrator, to build suspense.
The appearance is not important for our lives. Most people would say that yes. Appearance is important, but it’s not everything to know who they really are. Lucy Grealy in, Autobiography of a Face, has cancer on her face, and she has to remove the part of her face. That ruins her childhood. In her college years, she learns the way how she looks is not the only thing to her life. Nancy Mairs in, On Being a Cripple, suffer from a disability, and has uncomfortable movements. Although Grealy and Mairs suffer from their illness, at the end, the way how Grealy and Mairs look is not everything to them. No matter how people view their illness that cause their appearance doesn’t change who they are.
“They All Just Went Away” by Joyce Carol Oates is an amazing work. The language used is excellent, the presented descriptive details and events are exact and accurate. However the descriptions of the abandoned houses is upsetting. Still her essay helps the readers to define a family, home and a house and people’s relationships to each other. She did a remarkable job in presenting the stories about particular people and events that happens in each house. This gives the readers the feeling that some of them might have experienced stories. In this essay I will mention two stories that relates to the author’s story.
The imagery portrayed in “The Tell-tale Heart” increases the demented tone that the narrator projects as the main character waits to strangle the old man. Every night, for a week, the murderer would “look in” upon the victim as he slept. He describes himself as not being a “madman” but yet being able to “hear things in all heaven and earth.” The use of imagery shows the readers over and over again the reasons for the man murdering his victim. The “pale blue eye” is described in a way that even the audience wants to rid of it. This heightens the sense of insanity as even the readers can relate to the demented man.
Some of the things the narrator starts off by saying shows he is a madman or a psychopath. It is hard to trust someone like that because they are good manipulators and at falsifying information to others. The narrator reveals, “I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever” (Poe 37). No sane person would think of doing such a thing, they would just avoid seeing the old man. Instead, the narrator chooses to kill the old man which does not make sense to the average, but to him, this is the only way to relieve himself of the eye. As the narrator craziness increases throughout the story, one can see how the eye of the old
Edgar Allen Poe uses literary devices to express suspense and horror such as foreshadowing, mood, and tone. The author also uses key words and terms to show irony and mood. One example of irony is, “(for the shutters were close fastened through fear of robbers)” (Poe, 62). This is an example of situational irony because the old man thought the crime was going to be committed by someone outside of the home but was committed on the inside by the old man's roommate. This also explains how cautious the old man was and was not aware that the narrator was going to kill him. The author also uses mood to convey
Gothic Horror is a unique style of writing that is “characterized by elements such as fear and death along with romantic themes such as nature, individuality, and extreme emotion” while realism is a writing style that “presents the ordinary, familiar, or mundane aspects of life in a straightforward or matter-of-fact manner that is presumed to reflect life as it actually is.” “The Yellow Wallpaper” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a short, horror-filled story that vividly describes the mentally ill narrator’s experiences and emotional struggles of loneliness, anxiety, and uneasiness while being locked in a hideous room by herself for a long period of time. The story is definitely an example of realism, but the gothic horror writing style powerfully presents itself throughout the text with the use of eerie descriptions of the yellow wallpapered room, the narrator's