Would there be a difference in two fictional detectives in England, one living in the 12th century and the other in the 20th? Of course, not only because of different literary styles employed by authors but also in character development. G.K. Chesterton, famed English theologian, writes about the adventures of a Catholic Father with the name Brown, the latter of these two detectives. Brother Cadfael, a Welsh, living in medieval England came out of the imagination of an author with the pseudonym of Ellis Peters. Besides being set in two different periods, the detectives differed in their view of man, their sleuthing skills, and motivation for solving the crimes.
In every fictional book, the author develops the characters and often lets you in on the protagonist’s worldview and view of man. In the short story, The Blue Cross, Father Brown while talking to another priest stated, “[he] knows that people charge the Church with lowering reason, but it is just the way other way” (Chesterton 13). He views man as the one lowering reason in all actuality and thinks that reason acts as the ultimate moral standards. After observing man, Brown comes up with the belief where he thinks of humans as foolish and amusing. In the story, The Man in the Passage, the judge questions him in court why two distinguished men did not recognize themselves in the mirror while he did. He simply responded, “Really my lord, I don’t know…unless it’s because I don’t look at it so often” (Chesterton 61). Deliberately poking fun at the pompous dandies the judge referred to, he feels that those men have lost their true sense of who they were because they care too much about themselves and their status. Brother Cadfael’s view of man had empathy as well as understan...
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...lving crimes. Brother Cadfael however chose to be involved in determine the solution to the crime in A Morbid Taste for Bones. He felt as if he had an obligation to the murdered man’s daughter to help. When a fellow friend asked if Cadfael could gossip with him, Brother Cadfael replied “I’ll be glad to spend a while with you presently, but now I’m bound to her” (Peters 102) The pronoun ‘her’ refers to the daughter. Cadfael’s involvement in determining the guilty one came from an obligation that he willingly accepted.
Looking at the differences of Father Brown and Brother Cadfael, one notices how the authors distinctly gave them certain unique attributes. The differences not only came out through the plot and style, but also in the way they handled situations. Their different views on man, crime solving skills, and motivations gave them each definite personalities.
In the short story Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne, symbolism plays a vital role in the interpretation of the events of the story by the audience. In a work that is apparently never what it seems, drawing upon these symbols for clarity helps to provide the audience with additional depth to the deception that Goodman Brown feels. When going on his errand into the forest one night, Goodman Brown encounters the devil disguised as a man which is the beginning of his demonic encounters. The meeting symbolizes the start of his downward slope into the loss of faith of those around him and his own religious beliefs as well. He navigates the dark and chilling forest only to ultimately end up in the middle of it alone, which represents his journey through life after his revelation about the people in his community that night. His new found beliefs cause a projection of his own internal evil feelings upon his new wife faith. A woman who he once adored and had complete faith in just like her name, he now becomes very distant with and hardly acknowledges. His distance is due...
I think a major factor that made the lives of these lives of these two men so different was one got out of the street life while the other didn’t. Another major factor was when the author mom sent her son to military school. This changed him for the better because it took him away from the trouble he was getting in back at home.
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” utilize character responsibilities to create a sinister plot. For Hawthorne, protagonist Young Goodman Brown must leave his wife at home while he partakes in a night journey. For Poe, ancillary Fortunato covets a pretentious manner towards his wine tasting skills, and after being ‘challenged’ decides to prove his expertise by sampling Amontillado. Hawthorne and Poe showcase a theme of darkness but differ in their approach to the setting, characters, and fate of entrapment.
Wes (the author) has a family who wants to see him succeed. Although Wes didn’t know his father for long, the two memories he had of him and the endless stories his mother would share with him, helped guide him through the right path. His mother, made one of the biggest effects in Wes’s life when she decided to send him to military story, after seeing he was going down the wrong path. Perhaps, the other Wes’s mother tried her best to make sure he grew up to be a good person, but unfortunately Wes never listen. His brother, Tony was a drug dealer who wish he could go back in time and make the right decisions and he wanted Wes to be different than him. He didn’t want his brother to end up like him and even after he tried everything to keep Wes away from drugs, nothing worked and he gave up. As you can see, both families are very different, Wes (the author) has a family who wants him to have a bright future. Most importantly, a family who responds fast because right after his mother saw him falling down the wrong hill she didn’t hesitate to do something about it. The other Wes isn’t as lucky, as I believe since his mother already had so much pressure over keeping her job and her son Tony being involved in drugs. Same thing with Tony, he was so caught up in his own business that no one payed so much attention to
In the article, “‘Young Goodman Brown’ and the Psychology of Projection”, Michael Tritt critically analyzes Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” to construct the process of how Hawthorne regards Goodman Brown’s behavior. Tritt examines the phenomenon of projection in psychology and believes that “Brown’s compulsive condemnation of others, along with his consistent denial of his own culpability, illustrates a classically defined case of projection” (116). He defines projection as an unconscious process when a person projects their own traits or desires onto other people, thus representing a false perception on whom the projection is made.
Hawthorne's parable, "The Minister's Black Veil," uses symbols to illustrate the effect of shame and guilt. In the story, Mr. Hooper represents the average Christian with a deep longing to be holy, and have fellowship with man. However he allows the cross that he bears to come between himself and the latter. His secret is represented by the veil he wears. The veil itself is black, the color of both secrecy and sin. Spiritually, the veil embodies the presence of evil in all of mankind. In the physical realm it serves as emotional barrier between himself and everyone else (Timmerman). During his first sermon after donning the veil, it is observed that, "... while he prayed, the veil lay heavily on his uplifted countenance. Did he seek to hide it from the dread Being whom he was addressing?" (par 10). The veil made Mr. Hooper a powerful preacher. But even the people his messages touched the most would shudder when Mr. Hooper would move close to comfort them, his veiled face making them tremble (par 45). His personal relationships all but ceased to exist. Outside of church, he was seen as a bugbear, or monster. (par 44). Seemingly, the only one that did not fear the veil was his loving fiancée, Elizabeth. Elizabeth symbolizes purity. She is innocent and...
In the eyes of the narrator, Robert’s blindness is his defining characteristic. The opening line of "Cathedral" reads, "This blind man, an old friend of my wife’s, he was on his way to spend the night" (1052). Clearly, the narrator cannot see past Robert’s disability; he dismisses him in the same way a white racist might dismiss a black person. In reality, any prejudice—be it based on gender, race, or disability—involves a person’s inability to look past a superficial quality. People who judge a person based on such a characteristic are only seeing the particular aspect of the person that makes them uncomfortable. They are not seeing the whole person. The narrator has unconsciously placed Robert in a category that he labels abnormal, which stops him from seeing the blind man as an individual.
People exploit the faults in their surroundings in hypocritical attempts to justify their own imperfections. Goodman Brown and Dimmesdale demonstrate hypocrisy in their efforts to avoid confronting their own distorted realities. Both Goodman Brown and Dimmesdale seek to exemplify the ideal Puritan lifestyle. After succumbing to unfaithful temptations, both men recognize that they have transgressed certain central values of their respective puritan communities yet neither correctly identifies the sin that ultimately debases his initially righteous character. For instance, Goodman Brown breaches basic Puritan prin...
In many of Hawthorne’s stories, there are several instances where his main characters distinguish a sense of sin and guilt for what they have done throughout the story. In Robert P. Ellis’ article, “Nathaniel Hawthorne”, published in MagillLiterature Plus, Ellis states that “Often, Hawthorne’s characters cannot throw off the burden of a vague and irrational but weighty burden of guilt” (Ellis 4). Ellis regards characters in other Hawthorne stories as “examples of such guilt-ridden and essentially faithless men” (Ellis 5). Early in “Young Goodman Brown”, Brown leaves his wife, Faith, to take a night into the woods. When venturing through the woods, he stumbles upon a character that is portrayed to be the devil. During their meeting, the devil nonchalantly tells Brown that the people around him are not what they seem. The devil says that many men and women close to him are not the purely righteous people that they claim to be. Brown refuses to believe what he has just been told, in fact, he goes so far to loudly proclaim that “With heaven above and Faith below...
The acclaimed authors, Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle, formulate the characters of Auguste Dupin and Sherlock Holmes respectively, to be similar in the way that they analyze, deduce, and connect segments of desperate and often-thought “unsolvable” detective cases. Through their comparable techniques and system of deduction, Dupin and Holmes never fail to trace back their evidence to the scene of the crime. However, due to the vast difference in the writing styles of Poe and Doyle, the audience observes the main characters not as clones, but rather an analogous pair that think alike, but do not act alike. The personalities of Auguste Dupin and Sherlock Holmes, although present are recognizable differences in their actions, continue to
works of literature have tremendous amounts of similarity especially in the characters. Each character is usually unique and symbolizes the quality of a person in the real world. But in both stories, each character was alike, they represented honor, loyalty, chivalry, strength and wisdom. Each character is faced with a difficult decision as well as a journey in which they have to determine how to save their own lives. Both these pieces of literatures are exquisite and extremely interesting in their own ways.
The birth of classic detective fiction was originated just in the mid nineteenth century, and was producing its own genre. Classical detective fiction follows a set of rules called the ‘Ten commandments of detective fiction’. The genre is so popular it can bee seen by the number of sales in any good book stores. Many of these books have been created a long time ago and there is still a demand for these types of books. The popularity is still ongoing because it provides constant entertainment, and also the reader can also have a role of detective trying to solve the crime/case committed. Classical detective fiction has a formula, the detective story starts with a seemingly irresolvable mystery, typically a murder, features the astute, often unconventional detective, a wrongly accused suspect to whom the circumstantial evidence points, and concludes with a startling or unexpected solution to the mystery, during which the detective explains how he or she solved the mystery. Formula that includes certain elements such as, a closed location to keep the number of suspects down, red hearings spread around the stories to keep the reader entertained yet interacted.
Whilst both authors put forth an opinionated view of moral issues, the opinions presented leaned more traditionally. Immorality in every instance was analyzed through an inherently negative lens. This biased exploration of moral issues leaves the reader with a conflicting mindset. One might like the characters and disagree with how they acted, or the bias put forth changes how the reader views the characters as a whole. Looking through the inner conflicts and external conflicts present in both works one can see the similar methods authors take to examine moral issues as well as the difficulty of removing a personal investment an author might
...ther serves to excite and stimulate our senses as we travel into the deranged mind of a killer ? offering us a unique perspective through the first person point of view. Similarly, the ending of ?Young Goodman Brown? offers a moral, but leaves the main character in a state of discord and callousness towards his wife, and his religion. The story is didactic, because the main character is punished for his transgressions. Symbolism, evident especially in Hawthorne?s allegory, and the repetition of Poe?s suspenseful tale serve to further the goals of each writer. Ultimately, Hawthorne?s Goodman Brown becomes isolated from humanity, an issue of the head and the heart, and Poe?s narrator withdraws inside himself, an issue purely of the mind. Recognizing this discord from the self and humanity is essential to understanding the behavior of these troublesome characters.
The Constitution states that “all men are created equal”, but this statement did not accurately portray America until a long while after it was written. About 150 years ago after the civil war during the start of the Reconstruction era, America had promised racial equality. The start of the 20th century proved this otherwise. New laws and customs were created establishing a segregated society where African Americans were inferior to whites. Boys and girls that lived in this country who were eager to acquire a good education were not allowed to attend the same school. If you were not Caucasian, you were sent to a different school miles away from the nearest all white school. One day a little African American girl, Linda Brown, was not accepted into the nearest all white school near her school and was forced to travel a significant distance to school at only age 9 because she was African American. The nearest all white school was seven blocks away, and Linda had to walk six blocks just to catch the “black school bus”. Her father, Oliver Brown, did not agree to the fact that this should be the case especially after the Plessy v. Ferguson’s “separate but equal” doctrine was established. This disagreement with the law led Brown to take his discontent with the public schooling system to court, his case made it all the way to the Supreme Court providing motivation for many other great African American people in society to fight for their rights.