2.6 Detective stores “The Cask of Amontillado”
Edgar Poe’s “The Cask of Amantillado” is the story of revenge. Among those who have read the timeless classic “The Cask of Amantillado” by Edgar Allan Poe, some have come away disliking the story because of the speaker’s cruel act of revenge against Frotunato. This opinion is, indeed warranted for such a portrayal of delicious wickedness, however, it is important for the reader to consider the fact that Poe penned that story as a direct reflection of all things that brought him misery. The writer discusses how throughout his life, the author waged war against a multitude of overpowering entities that served to influence him in a distinctly negative manner, among them being that of alcoholism, vanity, greed and pride. Besides the element of revenge, here we can see an extremely tightly women story and how this story was a commentary by Poe on his disclaim of the aristocracy and all that they stood for, as well as his personal belief in the cruelty of society.
To Edgar Poe’s terror stories we also may refer “ The Tall of the House of Usher”. Here we see the ways in which Edgar Poe’s own background experiences, and personal beliefs are reflected. In this story the author employed literary parallels and dualism to connect events, characters and sense. The writer argues that the house is actually personified and as it gradually collapses so does the family within. The madness of an aristocrat old stock is described as the extreme subtlety of human abilities and feelings, as the result of culture, which embarked on the stage of degradation. The terror is defined by psychological state of the hero: “In his manner I saw at once, changes came and went; and I saw at once, changes came and went; and I soon found that this resulted from his attempt to quiet a very great nervousness. His actions were first too quick and then too quiet. Sometimes his voice, slow and trembling with fear, quickly changed to a strong, heavy, carefully spaced, too perfectly controlled manner. It was a family sickness he said, and one from which he could not hope to grow better but it was he added at once, only a nervous illness which would without doubt soon pass away. It showed itself in a number of strange feelings. Some of these, as he told me of them, interested me but were beyond my understanding; perhaps the way in which he told me of them added to their strangeness. He suffered much from a sickly increase in the feeling of all the senses; he could eat only the most tasteless food; all flowers smelled too strongly for his nose; his eyes were hurt by even a little light; and there were few sounds which did not fill him with horror. A certain kind of sick fear was completely his master. I fear what will happen in the future, not for what happens, but for the result of what happens. I have indeed, no fear of pain, but only fear of its result of terror! I feel that the time will soon arrive when u must lose my life, and my mind, and my soul together, in some last battle with that horrible enemy; “FEAR”[6]. The reader is shocked by amazing conciseness revealing of the cram, made by Roderick Usher and sudden collapse of the ancient house took place at so the same time. The story begins with the narrator riding toward the estate of a friend from childhood. While describing the house, the place where the Ushers live, the writer already reminds about that light crack on the background of the building and at the end he shows how it collapses. Here is the picture, which the narrator watched: “ I again looked up from the picture of the house reflected in the lake to the house itself. A strange idea grew in my mind an idea so strange that I tell it only to show the force of the feelings which laid their weight on me. I really believed that around the whole house, and the ground around it, the air itself was different. It was not the air of heaven. It roe from the dead, decaying trees, from the gray walls, and the quite lake. It was a sickly, unhealthy air that I could see, slow moving, heavy and gray. Shaking off from my spirit what must have been a dream, I looked more carefully at the building itself. The most noticeable thing about it seemed to be its great age. None of the walls had fallen, yet the stones appeared to be in a condition of advanced decay. Perhaps the careful eye would have discovered the beginning of a break in the front of the building, a crack making its way from the top down the wall until it became lost in the dark waters of the lake.[7] And at the end of the story the author shows how the storm fell on the house: “The storm was around me in all its strength as I crossed the bridge. Suddenly a wild light moved along the ground at my feet, and I turned to see where it could have come from, for only the great house and its darkness were behind me. The light was that of the full moon, of a blood-red moon, which was now shining through that break in the front wall, that crack which I thought I had seen when I first saw the place. Then only a little crack, it now widened as I watched. A strong wind came rushing over me the whole face of the moon appeared. I saw the great walls falling apart. There was a long and stormy shouting sound and the deep black lake closed darkly over all that remained of the “House of Usher”. So was the end, the fall not of only the house, but the fall of the family, which was a very old one, and had long been famous for its understanding of all the arts and for many quiet acts of kindness to the poor, and besides had never been a large one, with many branches. The name had passed always from father to son, and when people spoke of the “House of Usher”, they included both the family and the family home.[8]
ams, elegies, songs, satires and sermons. His poetry is noted for its vibrancy of language and inventiveness of metaphor, especially as compared to that of his contemporaries. John Donne's masculine, ingenious style is characterized by abrupt openings, paradoxes, dislocations, argumentative structure, and "conceits"--images which yoke things seemingly unlike. These features in combination with ...
... frequent use of dashes, sporadic capitalization of nouns, off-rhymes, broken metre, unconventional metaphors have contributed her reputation as one of the most innovative poets of 19th-century American literature. Later feminist critics have challenged the popular conception of the poet as a reclusive, eccentric figure, and underlined her intellectual and artistic sophistication. Emily Dickinson ...
... , Robert Burns was Scottish, James Joyce was Irish, Dylan Thomas was Welsh, Edgar Allan Poe was American, V.S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad, Vladimir Nabokov was Russian. PART II. WILLIAM SOMERSET MAUGHAM’S "OF HUMAN BONDAGE" AND JOSEPH CONRAD’S "LORD JIM" 2.1 The Moral Sense in Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim Lord Jim (1900), Joseph Conrad’s fourth novel, is the story of a ship which collides ...
... the remarkable words of their leader, Brewster: -- "It is not with us as with men whom small things can discourage or small discontentments cause to wish themselves at home again." 2 2.1.3 Puritan Colonies in New England The companies of settlers who followed the Pilgrims within the next few years were composed of the same sturdy, independent class of thoughtful, high-minded men. They were ...
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