Usher

In both of Edgar Allan Poe’s terrifying short stories, “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Cask of Amontillado” a murder is described in the eyes of the perpetrator. In “The Tell-Tale Heart” the murderer kills an old man because he believed that the old man’s milky eye was evil, whereas in “The Cask of Amontillado” a murderer kills a man who had previously insulted him. Edgar Allan Poe utilizes the narrator’s disturbing point of view and the cynical tone to entertain the reader with a suspenseful…

There are many problems in this world such as drinking and smoking that can make people do things they normally won't do. These addictions can significantly modify someone’s mindset. In Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Black Cat,” the narrator has a drinking problem that quickly changes him from the inside out. In the story “The Black Cat” Poe uses tone, inner thinking, and metaphors to create a dark mood in the story. In the story “The Black Cat” the author Poe changes his tone to cold and…

Summative Essay on Style For any author to write a genuine, ambiguous, and overall a wonderful story, there are a certain number of literary techniques that can be manipulated, for the authors benefit. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, someone who is considered to be a saint in English and Spanish writing, and Edgar Allan Poe, famous for his poetry and detective fiction, share many similarities in their writing styles. They both use tone, diction, and syntax in most, if not all of their short stories,…

William Faulkner is a man who has written drastically complex works and is renowned around the world. His major works include The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, written in the 18th century. Faulkner was a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize for his novel writing as well as two Pulitzer prizes and National Book Awards. Additionally, he received his education from the University of Mississippi. The film A Rose for Emily directed by Lyndon Chubbuck is based upon William Faulkner’s short…

“Human beings are unable to be honest with themselves about themselves. They cannot talk about themselves without embellishing.” According to director Akira Kurosawa, this is the meaning behind his film Rashomon. The film is an adaptation of the short story “In a Grove” by Ryunosuke Akutagwa, a mystery regarding the murder of the samurai Takehiko. It is told through the points of view of the people involved, including the dead samurai himself. Because three of the main characters did plead…

Gothic fiction or Gothicism is a genre or a type of literature and films that is literally a combination of horrors and fictions and even romance at times it also includes death and supernaturalism. It was known to be introduced by a famous Victorian writer Horace Walpole during the 17th century with his famous and well known book The Castle of Otranto also known as the Gothic Story. When he used the word gothic it literally meant something like ‘barbarous’, as well as ‘deriving from the Middle…

Gloomy, dreary, creepy, forbidding, dark, horror, and fear, are all words that describe gothic literature. Gothic literature is something that the writer Edgar Allan Poe has much knowledge about, for he has written many gothic short stories and poems. Such as the short stories like, “The Black Cat”, “Tell Tale Heart”, “The Pit and the Pendulum”, and “Masque of the Red Death”. Also displayed in his poems, “Alone”, “Annabel Lee”, “The Raven”, and somewhat of “The Bells”. To a great extent, Edgar…

Gothic fiction is one of the most intriguing and captivating, if not most popular, literary genres for a reason. Branded mainly by the elements of fear, horror, death, and gloom, this style of writing, whose name derives from the dark and decaying gothic architecture and art, is also rich in romantic elements, such as nature, individuality, and sentiment. Originated in England in the second half of the 18th century, the gothic fiction has spread its popularity across continental Europe by the…

Conventional versus contemporary. Paranormal versus verism. Charles Dickens’ “The Signalman” and Roald Dahl’s “Lamb to the Slaughter”, two pieces of Gothic prose, are different yet, in various ways, similar. Written with the creation of suspense and tension in mind, both stories are tied with a common theme of insanity. One of the ways that the two writers create suspense is by utilising the description of the setting and the themes. Dickens reiterates the words “gloomy” and “dark” as well as…

Have you ever been so sure about a certain ending of a story and then the narrator turns everything upside down in a blink of an eye? Then, you have certainly tasted the purest form of fiction’s beauty, which is the “plot twist”. Plot twists are those sudden unexpected turns in the stories that reveal significant details beyond them; some of the plot twists can be foreshadowed by several hints throughout the story, while others are totally unexpectable. Among numerous fiction stories, there are…