Comparison of Two Short Stories: the Red Room and Farthing House

The comparisons and contrasts between The Hiding Place and Night. Both books were written with struggles, tenderness, agony, and fear in mind. Of these two books only one comes out and realizes that what they have gone through was not a cruse but some what a blessing from God, Himself. The struggles both face is more than just man against man but it is also a struggle within to find who they truly are and whom they truly believe in. Both main characters, Eli and Corrie, faced something they never knew they could face but only one comes out stronger than the other.

“House Taken Over” is exceptionally shorter than “Usher” and incorporates modern English and a calmer mood to express the Magical Realism in the story. Cortazar’s text is much less intense than Poe’s and uses far more ordinary and recognizable characters and setting. He tells the story of a brother and his sister Irene and the activities they do in their daily life. The plot is then shifted towards fear with the addition of the fantastic events of the supernatural beings. “I went down the corridor as far as the oak door, which was ajar, then turned into the hall toward the kitchen, when I heard something in the library or the dining room. The sound came through muted and indistinct, a chair being knocked over onto the carpet or the muffled buzzing of a conversation. At the same time or a second later, I heard it at the end of the passage which led from those two rooms toward the door” (39). The characters in “House” have an unimpressed tone when they learn of the otherworldly creatures and try to ignore it, indicating that the story is indeed written in the style of Magical Realism. “‘I had to shut the door to the passage. They’ve taken over the back part.’ She let her knitting fall and looked at me with tired, serious eyes. ‘You’re sure?’ I nodded. ‘In that case,’ she said, picking up her needle again, ‘we’ll have to live on this side’”

By using pathos, he creates an appeal to the reader from many different aspects. Fear is one emotion he tries to get at. When he

The narrator though an educator, is not very good at verbalizing his emotions. He tends to be the person who keeps everything inside

Greed - an emotion that every person experiences regardless of if they have a good conscious or not. According to the Merriam Webster dictionary, greed is “a selfish and excessive desire for more of something (such as money) than is needed.” When comparing the “Man Who Sold the World” category to Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, the most obvious similarity between the two is the greed that characters within the text have. “The Right Kind of House”, “The Killers” (found within the “Man Who Sold the World Category”), and Fahrenheit 451 share a common theme. All three of these texts clearly present that greed is eventually followed with ruinous consequences.

Setting places the character and the action to a certain place so that the reader can visualize what is happening in the story. Setting is one of the most obvious similarities between these two stories is their settings. They are both set in dreary, dark, ominous houses for most of the action of the story. One of the houses is set at midnight and the witching hour, and the other house is in disrepair, and is almost disintegrating around the people who live there. Consequently, settings virtually always have implications on the story’s tone. The dark, dreary houses give the stories foreboding tones that add to the horror. Already Poe employs the same setting and tones in these stories that put chills down the readers spines, but they also show the similitude in his writing style.

Setting places the character and the action to a certain place so that the reader can visualize what is happening in the story. The setting is one of the most obvious similarities between these two stories is their settings. Dreary, dark, ominous houses are the settings for most of the action of both stories. “The Tell-Tale Heart”’s action occurs at midnight and the witching hour. “The Fall of the House of Usher”’s house is in disrepair and is almost disintegrating around the people who live there. Consequently, settings virtually always have implications on the story’s tone. The dark, dreary houses give the stories foreboding tones that add to the horror. Already Poe employs the same setting and tones in these stories that put chills down the reader's spines, but they also show the similitude in his writing style.

The narrator comes to the House to aid his dying friend, Roderick Usher. As he arrives at the House he comes upon an “aura of vacancy and decay… creating a pathologically depressive mood” (Cook). The state of the House is daunting to the narrator – he describes it with such features as “bleak walls”, “eye-like windows”, “rank sedges”, “decayed trees”, and “an utter depression of the soul”. These images foreshadow a less than pleasant future for the narrator and his dear friend Roderick. Poe continues to foreshadow the narrators turn of events with a description of the House’s “dark” and “comfortless” furniture. The House becomes a living hell for the narrator as he watches Roderick’s condition evolve and struggles to understand the mystery tying unfortunate events together. However, as the narrator gradually becomes more enveloped in Roderick and the House’s malady, he seems to develop a malady of his own. While the narrator’s illness is less prominent than that of Roderick and his sister Lady Madeline, the sicknesses are one in the same.

It's a book that relates to color psychology very well, but there's one color that I think sums it up perfectly. The color purple represents the story Of Mice and Men because it's combination of red and blue is shown in the anger and rage personified in the migrant workers and the overwhelming sadness that most of the characters encounter during the story.

When Henry returns, he has no desire to ride in the red convertible, no desire to wear the bright colored clothes he used to dawn-- instead Henry just liked to sit around and sob about the war. The quote from the middle of the story, speaking about the television, and how Henry just sat “in front of it, watching it, and that was the only time he

Foreshadowing is used to give a sense to the reader on what could happen next, and as the narrator moves around the house and describes it, the reader gets the feeling that something that has previously happened, could happen to the narrator herself later on. When the narrator first moves into the summer mansion home, she gets a weird sense from the place. She refers to it as a ‘haunted house’ and wonders why it would be rented so cheaply. From the beginning, the reader knows that the narrator does not like the house, because she describes it as a haunted house, meaning that something strange is being foreshadowed. Just like a haunted house, there are obstacles along the way, and you are trapped inside until you build some courage and take care of yourself. That is what will happen to the narrator, as her husband tells her she is not allowed to leave until she gets cured, but different events act as obstacles that make it hard for the narrator to get better. As the narrator is describing the house and the specifics around different rooms, when she stops at the room she will be living is she states that “the windows are barred, and there are rings and things in the walls...I never saw a worse paper in my

“The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe, published in 1839, can be compared to Poe’s later work “The Tell-Tale Heart”, published in 1843. In both gothic stories, there are physical deformities, mental illness, and despicable crimes. In “The Fall of the House of Usher”, Roderick Usher, the main character, and one of the last of the Usher blood line, had a twin sister, Madeline, who suffered from a mysterious illness. After believing she had died, Roderick learned that was not the case --Madeline was still alive-- yet he buried her anyway. In “The Tell-Tale Heart”, an unnamed narrator lived with an old man, whom he was plotting to murder because he wanted to help rid the world of the old man’s evil eye. In both Poe’s stories death is a very prominent theme (Davis).

Contrasting this would be the quintessential transcendentalist story that would tend to contain bright colors and other understated representations of divinity. (Quinn) Poe wastes no time, ridiculing this aspect in the first sentence of the story. The story begins in the fall, “during the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day…when the clouds hung oppressively low” in the sky (Poe 2497). As the narrator approaches the house he says “a sense of insufferable gloom pervading my spirit”(Poe 2498). The decayed state of the house is inconsistent with transcendentalism, where the story settings tend towards the resplendent. This gloomy setting remains throughout the entire story, becoming increasingly so as the story advances. Poe opposes transcendentalism's positive aspects of descriptive scenery midway through the text. Poe begins the essential disdain of transcendentalism by outwardly mocking the “here and now” beliefs of the transcendentalists. In the beginning of the text the narrator is returning to a childhood dwelling to relive the past with his old friend. The narrator speaks of his sleepless nights and the uneasiness that accompanies them. He believes the room in which is he lying contributes to this insomnia saying: “…the bewildering influence of the gloomy furniture of the room-of the dark and tattered draperies…” (Poe 2507) Later, a raging storm attacks the Usher estate. The narrator states that “…all

When they first arrive at the colonial house the narrator is happy about the house. It it the most beautiful house as it “stand[s] well back from the road, quite three miles from the village” and it makes her “think of English places that you read about, for there are hedges and walls and gates that lock, and lots of separate little housed for the hardeners and people” (88). She arrives at the house and deems it to be just like the haunted houses society reads about at the time. The house is in some legal troubles over who rightly owns the house, which is why they were able to get the house so cheap. While the narrator wanted to take a room downstairs with a view of the gardens, her husband places her in a room upstairs. She describes the room upstairs as “a big, airy room, the whole floor nearly, with windows that look all ways, and

Both Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft were known for their tales of horror, shocking discoveries and mysterious characters. Lovecraft was known to have mimicked Poe’s style in his popular horror stories of the early 20th century. Poe, one of the most famous writers of short stories and poems in the 19th century, amazed readers with his rich descriptions and chilling plots. Neither disappoint in two of their stories: Poe’s “Tale of the Ragged Mountains” and Lovecraft’s “The Outsider.” Although these are not the most famous of each authors’ works, scholars often debate over the meaning and themes of each story. One common theme in both the