Metzengerstein

Saadat Hasan Manto is one of the greatest short story writers in Urdu literature who has produced twenty two collections of short stories dealing with different subjects such as partition, human life, social taboos, communal violence, so on and so forth. His stories revolving round the subject of partition of the subcontinent after independence in 1947 are more famous and more known than his other stories. Toba Tek Singh is one such story, a masterpiece, which is interwoven with the theme of partition and its emotional and psychological effects on the human psyche. Manto very realistically depicts the division of society into different sects after the partition in the name of the religion. Toba Tek Singh tells a story of migration of Hindus and Muslims to India and Pakistan respectively after partition in the name of religion. The paper attempts to critically analyze the story as a political satire and criticize the political regimes of both India and Pakistan which divided the nation both religiously and geographically. Key words: Partition, Religion, Division, Political Satire, India, Pakistan, Migration. Introduction Saadat Hasan Manto is one of the renowned and prolific short story writers in Urdu literature, whose stories move around the social, political and cultural happenings of pre, during and post partition of India. He was born on 11th May, 1912, in Sambrala at Punjab. Manto’s stories deal with the different subjects such as partition, man-woman relationship,…

the Berlifitzing family. The horse stands “motionless and statue-like” (28) in the foreground of the image while a Metzengerstein kills a Berlifitzing in the background. The description location of the horse alone draws negative feelings and images. First, it is enormous and positioned in the front of the tapestry, which will draw one’s eye to it immediately, where one would then see that it is “unnaturally colored”. This implants the idea that the horse itself isn’t just an average horse – that…

characters merely created with the intention to scare the audience, they actually have much deeper meaning in that they are used to speak more about the protagonist psychologically. In some such stories, like Metzengerstein, the tale is written with a detached narrator who witnesses the fall of the protagonist to darkness. In other stories, like in The Raven or The Black Cat, there is a narrator detailing his own experiences while leaving the possibility of unreliable narration in which his…

forces his characters to feel isolated, and thus he creates a haunting experience for the readers as the characters struggle to face their physical limits (Shear). The recurring technique of metempsychosis was used by Poe to cause his main characters to feel isolated in their opinions and extremely alone. The characters that observe metempsychosis are often traumatized by their noticing of the “soul migration” of another character, and often feel shocked at the supernatural occurrence. “In A…

His work was considered to be of the Gothic or dark romanticism genre. His work themes included death, premature burial, mourning, the dead coming alive and signs of death. When Poe wasn't writing horror stories about ravens and death he wrote satire and hoax tales. Poe was a fan of extravagance and irony and often used these ideas to move the reader away from cultural conformity. The story Metzengerstein (A story about an ongoing feud between two families that ends with a man being thrown into…

accident at sea and a mysterious ship that disappears out of the “watery hell”, won a competition sponsored by the Baltimore Saturday Visitor. One of the judges of this competition offered Poe a job as an editor at a The Saturday Courier. All of his hard work has finally paid off and he felt secure enough to provide for himself consistently. Now that he felt financially stable, Poe decided to marry his 13-year-old cousin, Virginia. Ever since he moved in with his Aunt and cousin, romance had…