Compare and Contrast Two Short Stories From Different Time Periods Essay

But from the same genreIn this essay I will compargon the pre 20th vitamin C text The dark- peel offned toss (1843) by Edgar Allen Poe and the post 20th light speed text sines Event (1984) by Clive bow-wow some(prenominal) of which atomic number 18 horror stories.Edgar Allen Poe was born in Boston, USA in 1809. He had a brother, heat content, and a sister, Rosaline. In December of 1812 the children were orphaned and the family was split up. Henry stayed in Balti to a greater extent(prenominal) with his grandp bents. Edgar and Rosaline Poe were taken in by wealthy Richmond families, Rosaline by the Mackenzies and Edgar by the Allans. In 1827 prior to enlisting in the army Edgar wrote his scratch line two poems known as To Margaret and To Octavia. By 1833 Edgar had begun to write stories and in 1835 he married his cousin, Virginia besides she died 12 years later. On 7 October 1849 at ab break 4.30pm Poe died. The actual ca function of death at the relatively issue age of 4 0 has never been confirmed. Poe was buried in his grandfathers solidifying in the Westminster burying ground.Throughout his life sentence Poe had been victimised and taken advantage of and I rally this may have got influenced some of his texts.Clive Barker was born near Penny Lane, Liverpool in 1952. After attending junior-grade school in that city, He entered Liverpool University to study English literature and philosophy. At the age of 21 he moved to London. There, he formed a theatre company to perform plays that he had written, and worked in that medium end-to-end his twenties as a writer, a director and an actor.About himself, Clive writes My passion as an artist is rooted not in any farewellicular(prenominal) medium, but in the act of imaging. My books, films, drawings and plays, thought they may seem to be very disparate in content, are still mapping out different parts of the same landscape that is to say, the world between my ears, I am motivated to write or paint by the images and scenes which rebel from my subconscious, without invitation, which seems on closer inspection to dramatize elements of my deeper self.Un same(p) Poe, Barker didnt have an unhappy childhood and had a adept university edu roamion and as he says above he uses thoughts form his subconscious to influence his palpate rather than as perhaps in Poes case, perhaps real life planets.Hells event is about a quicken between Heaven and Hell to see which will be in power for the next hundred years, the con mads for Heaven dont know about the importance of the race, they think it is sound another race. There are four contenders for Heaven, Nick Loyer, Joel J wizs, abrupt McCloud and Lester Kinder valet de chambre. The contender for Hell is Malcolm Voight although he is real three people, he is angiotensin converting enzyme of three familiars from wickedness, the idea being that they all run a unrivalled third of the race, Burgess is the familiars master and he appears quite a lot in the study as does hell itself. Joel Jones is one of the main faces in the reputation, as is Cameron, his coach. Joel is killed towards the end of the race and it looks like Voight is going to win. But however before the line he is taken over by Kinderman.The calamitous Cat is about a man who utilize to be an brute lover and had a large variety of pets including birds, goldfish, a dog, rabbits, a picayune monkey and a cat called Pluto. Over the years the man grew turned and irritable and swore and hit his wife, he neglected and ill-used his pets all but Pluto. But as the man got steadily worse he started mistreating Pluto. last the man hung Pluto from a tree and on that night his house burned down. The man survived and the morning after the fire came back to the finished house to find an image of a gigantic cat with a rope round its neck imprinted on the wall. One night the man was sat intoxicated in a pub and he see sat on a hogshead of gin a cat that looked just like Pluto apart from a splotch of white diligence part of its body. The man found that the creature had no owner and so took it home. The man soon started hating the cat as he had done with Pluto. in conclusion the man kills his wife whilst trying to kill the cat and is caught by the police.In my opinion in that respect are three main protagonists in Hells Event. Joel Jones is one of these three, Joel is a sympathetic character, and we are shown that he is a sympathetic or good character from the beginning of the narration, at the start of the race Joel is affright because he has had braggy dreams this immediately tells the ratifier that Joel is a sympathetic character. If Joel had been an incompatible character he would probably not be scared by a bad dream Joel is superstitious as he has a good luck charm, which also shows the reader that he is a good character. Later in the report Voight calls Joel a black bastard, which increases the readers zest of Joel a nd has the opposite effect on the character Voight. The Author makes us like Joel by making us feel sympathetic towards him in this way.another(prenominal) of the three characters is Cameron, Cameron is another Good character, he is Joels coach. It is not overt from the premier(prenominal) page that Cameron is a good character, on this page Cameron is ban because he cant get a signal on his radio, and so the reader is not sure whether Cameron is a nice character until the act page where he is comforting Joel but comforting him in his own sort of non-sympathetic way for event Cameron says They love you, God knows wherefore they love you.The third main character in Hells Event is Burgess, even before you know his phone you know that Burgess is an at least(prenominal) a cheating(a) if not deplorable character, the first thing he says in response to Cameron saying, What the hell is going on is Precisely that Mr Cameron hell is going on. This is quite a witty yet nasty thing t o say, also Burgess is violateing a goat skin surface which still has the hooves and horns hanging from it, this emphasizes the fact that Burgess is a bad and un-sympathetic character, a good character would be very unlikely to wear this sort of coat.Clive Barker has tried to make burgess more abominable by describing the coat in detail, he says He wore a coat apparently made of several goat-skins. The hooves and the horns still hung from it. The blood on its fur was brown and gummy. On page forty-five about halfway through the story Burgess admits that he works for hell. The very fact that he works for hell will tell the reader that he is an evil character. Although Burgess is an evil character some of the things Barker writes, which Burgess says are quite witty and funny.In The black cat there are also three main protagonists The two cats and the man who tells the story, which is told in first somebody whereas Hells Event is written in third person. You never actually learn of the mans phone, so for the purpose of this essay I will consult to him simply as The man. Also you never learn of the second cats name and so I will refer to him as The cat.The man who tells the story is a good character at the beginning, but as the story goes on he gets more ill tough and scarlet until at the end of the story he is a violent character. The story starts after it has ended, with the man who must be in prison, committal to writing about what has happened to him. It makes the reader feel sorry for him, he tells us that he is going to die tomorrow which makes us feel sorry for him. He also writes, My immediate purpose is to place before the world, plainly, succinctly, and without comment, a serial publication of mere household events. In their consequences, these events have terrified have hagridden have sunk me.Poe makes the words have more empathy by using repetition e.g., have terrified have tortured have destroyed me, the words getting more disastrous ev ery time. Then the story properly starts, with the man describing how he grew up loving animals and being tender of heart, he describes how he had lots of animals, which he loved this turns the reader to persuasion that the man is kind and wondering why he was about to be killed at the start of the story, which makes you want to read on. As the story goes on the man starts to get violent towards his pets and eventually kills them all, including Pluto his character gets more violent and Poe shows this by describing how the man feels at that point for voice he says The fury of a demon instantly possessed me. I knew myself no longer. My soul seemed, at once, to take its flight from my body.There isnt a great deal that I can write about the cats as they dont actually say anything, but Poe makes us feel sorry for them, and in turn makes us hate the man more by describing in graphic detail how they are mistreated. For instance he writes I took from my undershirt pocket a pen-knife, ope ned it, grasped the poor beast by the throat, and measuredly cut one of its eyes from the socket. Barker also uses this technique in hells event as I have written above.The first carve up of Hells Event is written in the past tense, you can tell by the way dates are mentioned that this is so. E.g. Hell came up to the streets and squares of London that September, icy from the depths of the ordinal circle, it says that September which means, the September that has been. After that split up though the story goes into the present tense, as if the events were happening now, for example mike who is one of the race commentators says And what a day it is. As if it is happening today. The storyteller is an omniscient storyteller, for instance he knows that Joel feels sick in the pit of his stomach and that Cameron smelt a fix when he saw Voights double. Using an omniscient narrator has advantages because it enables the writer to explain how a character is feeling.In The swart Cat the te nses are written in the opposite way to hells event, the first paragraph is written in the present tense where the man is probably in jail and is writing the story of how he ended up in his present situation. You can tell because of how the first paragraph is written, for example, But tomorrow I die and today I would unburden my soul, by reading this a reader can work out that he is writing in the present. After this paragraph he starts reading the story he has written, which is in the past tense, and uses words like was and were which are in the past tense. These are used in sentences like Pluto this was the cats name and my pets of course were made to feel the change in my disposition. Because the man writes his story in first person he can tell the reader his thoughts, you could say he is an omniscient narrator, but then again he does not know the thoughts of the cats.There are quite a a couple of(prenominal) differences in The Black Cat and Hells event in terms of applied sci ence and change over the years, these includeHogsheads of gin, which are no longer usedServants, the only people who still have servants now are the passing wealthy and royalty.Gallows, These used to be used for putting people to death.Radios, non invented in the 1800sCars, Cars were not around in the early 1800s.There have been lots of changes in spelling and punctuation since The Black cat was written, for example the line I even offered her personal violence, which the man uses to record how he treats his wife would not be used today, today a more direct approach would be used for instance you faculty use I even hit her which is a lot more to the point.Some words have completely new meaning, nowadays a word like dress which is a garment usually faint by a woman, but in the 1800s it meant the clothes that a person was wearing. The choice of words, which authors use, has change since the 1800s. For example in the 1800s Poe used I suffered myself to use intemperate language to my wife. Which means the man swore at his wife, but in Hells Event barker just simply uses the actual words, which express his characters feelings more, for example, Shit, utter Cameron as he was plunged into darkness.Shorter words are now used quite of longer more difficult ones like intoxicated which means drunk and felons cell, which means prison.There is no open speech in The Black Cat instead there is reported speech. In this story there are lots of things that would not be written today, e.g. Pluto this was the cats name was my popular pet. Would be written today as Pluto (this was the cats name) was my favourite pet.I preferred hells event to The Black Cat because there was a bit more detail which made it more horrific, like the part where Joel is killed, Joel felt the last of his strength falter his arm could keep the spill the beans at bay no longer. Despairing, he felt the teeth at his brow and at his chin, felt them pierce his flesh and his bone, felt, finally, the white night evade him, as the mouth bit off his face. Also The Black Cat is harder to read because a lot of words in it are no longer used. Both storys were good and I like the horror genre in general anyway so I enjoyed reading the storys.