The short story called “The Landlady” written by Roald Dahl has an amazing amount of suspense and foreboding. Dahl’s diction brings the reader to a point to wonder what he is trying to convey. Billy Weaver is a 17-year-old boy who has traveled by train from London to the city of Bath, and he was quite unfamiliar with it. Shortly, he was starting a new job there, and is on his way to The Bell and Dragon, which is a pub where he was told to stay at when something caught his eye. He saw a house that was offering a bed and breakfast. At first he noticed that the Landlady was a little on the kooky side, but was blinded by her round pink face and gentle blue eyes, and also her kindness. He was trapped, and eventually it resulted in his death.
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Then Billy says, “This last entry is over two years old.” (pg. 180) This piece from the text is an example of suspense and foreboding as there could be something wrong with the wrong with the house, or even the Landlady. “Im almost positive it was in the newspapers I saw them.” (pg. 181) In this quote Billy is talking about the characters Christopher Mulholland and Gregory Temple. They were the only two other guests who ever stayed at the Landlady’s house. The use of irony illustrates interest in Billy, being that we were expecting more people to have stayed at the house, but she has only had two men around the same age as Billy. She also kept calling all three men handsome, and that she is awfully particular about the men that stay at her house. This last quote shows dramatic irony. “The tea tasted faintly of bitter almonds, and he didn't care much for it.” (pg. 184) Bitter almonds is a smell/taste that is in a kind of rat poison. So why would she be using rat poison? To kill him. The Landlady is a taxidermist, but animals aren’t the only goods she
The author illustrates the “dim, rundown apartment complex,” she walks in, hand and hand with her girlfriend. Using the terms “dim,” and “rundown” portrays the apartment complex as an unsafe, unclean environment; such an environment augments the violence the author anticipates. Continuing to develop a perilous backdrop for the narrative, the author describes the night sky “as the perfect glow that surrounded [them] moments before faded into dark blues and blacks, silently watching.” Descriptions of the dark, watching sky expand upon the eerie setting of the apartment complex by using personification to give the sky a looming, ominous quality. Such a foreboding sky, as well as the dingy apartment complex portrayed by the author, amplify the narrator’s fear of violence due to her sexuality and drive her terror throughout the climax of the
“Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen” (“Brainy Quotes” 1). In Edith Wharton’s framed novel, Ethan Frome, the main protagonist encounters “lost opportunity, failed romance, and disappointed dreams” with a regretful ending (Lilburn 1). Ethan Frome lives in the isolated fictional town of Starkfield, Massachusetts with his irritable spouse, Zenobia Frome. Ever since marriage, Zenobia, also referred to as Zeena, revolves around her illness. Furthermore, she is prone to silence, rage, and querulously shouting. Ethan has dreams of leaving Starkfield and selling his plantation, however he views caring for his wife as a duty and main priority. One day, Zeena’s cousin, Mattie Silver, comes to assist the Frome’s with their daily tasks. Immediately, Mattie’s attractive and youthful energy resuscitates Ethan’s outlook on life. She brings a light to Starkfield and instantaneously steals Ethan’s heart; although, Ethan’s quiet demeanor and lack of expression causing his affection to be surreptitious. As Zeena’s health worsens, she becomes fearful and wishes to seek advice from a doctor in a town called Bettsbridge giving Ethan and Mattie privacy for one night. Unfortunately, the night turns out to be a disastrous and uncomfortable evening. Neither Ethan nor Mattie speaks a word regarding their love for one another. Additionally, during their dinner, the pet cat leaps on the table and sends a pickle dish straight to the floor crashing into pieces. To make matters worse, the pickle dish is a favored wedding gift that is cherished by Zeena. Later, Zeena discovers it is broken and it sends her anger over the edge. Furious, Zeena demands for a more efficient “hired girl” to complete the tasks ar...
He later allows the reader to visualise his town through a description of his street. "Each deadbeat no-hoper shithole lonely downtrodden house in Longlands Road, Nowheresville." This repetition of colloquial negative adjectives expresses Billy's depressing feelings about his home. Billy's undesirable view of his town along with other factors such as being abused by his father aid his decision to leave and discover what else life has to offer. Because of his adverse position Billy decides to leave his town to seek a better life. To do this he becomes a homeless runaway which is his first transition in the
Ted Kooser’s “Abandoned Farmhouse” is a tragic piece about a woman fleeing with her child, the husband ditched in isolation. The mood of the poem is dark and lonesome, by imagining the painting the writer was describing I felt grim because of what the family went through. As reported in the text, ”Money was scarce, say the jars of plum preserves and canned tomatoes sealed in the cellar hole.” This demonstrates the understanding of why they deserted the farmhouse. The author also composes, “And the winters cold, say the rags in the window frames.” This proves that the residence was unaccompanied. When placing the final touches, the reader begins feeling dark and lonesome, asking about the families disappearance.
Negative experiences of belonging within the individual’s place of residence results in low self-esteem and develops the desire to escape and seek belonging elsewhere. We witness this in Herrick’s The Simple Gift in Longlands Road, when Billy says, ‘this place has never looked so rundown and beat’, which conveys his lack of connection to the place through pejorative colloquial personification of place. The “rundown and beat” nature of “place” parallels Billy’s perception of both himself and his home by using the pathetic fallacy of rain. Moreover, his hatred towards “Nowhereville” is expressed using coarse language and the symbolic action of vandalising the houses of his neighbours with pejorative colloquialism in ‘I throw one rock on the road of each deadbeat no hoper shithole lonely downtrodden house.’ This shows the place of residence is an important influence on creating a sens...
Under the orders of her husband, the narrator is moved to a house far from society in the country, where she is locked into an upstairs room. This environment serves not as an inspiration for mental health, but as an element of repression. The locked door and barred windows serve to physically restrain her: “the windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls.” The narrator is affected not only by the physical restraints but also by being exposed to the room’s yellow wallpaper which is dreadful and fosters only negative creativity. “It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide – plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.”
“They had both found life meaningless, partly because of what they had seen in the war. Rosewater, for instance, had shot a fourteen-year-old fireman. mistaking him for a German soldier. So it goes. And Billy had Seen the greatest massacre in European history, which was the fire-bombing of Dresden. So it goes. So they were trying to re-invent themselves and their
The story starts out with a hysterical.woman who is overprotected by her loving husband, John. She is taken to a summer home to recover from a nervous condition. However, in this story, the house is not her own and she does not want to be in it. She declares it is “haunted” and “that there is something queer about it” (The Yellow Wall-Paper. 160). Although she acknowledges the beauty of the house and especially what surrounds it, she constantly goes back to her feeling that there is something strange about the house. It is not a symbol of security for the domestic activities, it seems like the facilitates her release, accommodating her, her writing and her thoughts, she is told to rest and sleep, she is not even allow to write. “ I must put this away, he hates to have me write a word”(162). This shows how controlling John is over her as a husband and doctor. She is absolutely forbidden to work until she is well again. Here John seems to be more of a father than a husband, a man of the house. John acts as the dominant person in the marriage; a sign of typical middle class, family arrangement.
The story begins with the narrator’s description of the physically confining elements surrounding her. The setting is cast in an isolated colonial mansion, set back from the road and three miles from the village (674). The property contains hedges that surround the garden, walls that surround the mansion, and locked gates that guarantee seclusion. Even the connected garden represents confinement, with box-bordered paths and grape covered arbors. This image of isolation continues in the mansion. Although she prefers the downstairs room with roses all over the windows that opened on the piazza the narrator finds herself consigned to an out of the way dungeon-like nursery on the second floor. "The windows in the nursery provide views of the garden, arbors, bushes, and trees”(674). These views reinforce isolationism since, the beauty can be seen from the room but not touched or experienced. There is a gate at the head of the stairs, presumably to keep children contained in their play area of the upstairs with the nursery. Additionally, the bed is immoveable " I lie here on this great immovable bed- it is nailed down, I believe-and follow that pattern about by the hour" (678). It is here in this position of physical confinement that the narrator secretly describes her descent into madness.
Many features of the setting, a winter's day at a home for elderly women, suggests coldness, neglect, and dehumanization. Instead of evergreens or other vegetation that might lend softness or beauty to the place, the city has landscaped it with "prickly dark shrubs."1 Behind the shrubs the whitewashed walls of the Old Ladies' Home reflect "the winter sunlight like a block of ice."2 Welty also implies that the cold appearance of the nurse is due to the coolness in the building as well as to the stark, impersonal, white uniform she is wearing. In the inner parts of the building, the "loose, bulging linoleum on the floor"3 indicates that the place is cheaply built and poorly cared for. The halls that "smell like the interior of a clock"4 suggest a used, unfeeling machine. Perhaps the clearest evidence of dehumanization is the small, crowded rooms, each inhabited by two older women. The room that Marian visits is dark,...
This essay will compare and contrast “The Curse,” by Josh Ritter and “The Landlady” by Roald Dahl. “The Curse” is a song about a mummy who falls in love with a lady, then she gets cursed and dies. “The Landlady” is about a dude who goes to a hotel run by an old lady who stuffs dead guests. These stories use irony, but for different reasons. One story is sad, the other is unnerving.
In the opening scenes of the story the reader gets the impression that the boy lives in the backwash of his city. His symbolic descriptions offer more detail as to what he thinks about his street. The boy says “North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street [it’s houses inhabited with] decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces” (Joyce 984). This shows that the boy feels that the street and town have become conceited and unoriginal. While to young to comprehend this at the time the matured narrator states that he now realizes this. The boy is also isolated in the story because he mentions that when the neighborhood kids go and play he finds it to be a waste of time. He feels that there are other things he could be doing that playing with the other boys. This is where the narrator starts to become aware of the fact that not everything is what is seems. He notices the minute details but cannot quite put them together yet. As the story progresses one will see that th...
The story begins as the boy describes his neighborhood. Immediately feelings of isolation and hopelessness begin to set in. The street that the boy lives on is a dead end, right from the beginning he is trapped. In addition, he feels ignored by the houses on his street. Their brown imperturbable faces make him feel excluded from the decent lives within them. The street becomes a representation of the boy’s self, uninhabited and detached, with the houses personified, and arguably more alive than the residents (Gray). Every detail of his neighborhood seems designed to inflict him with the feeling of isolation. The boy's house, like the street he lives on, is filled with decay. It is suffocating and “musty from being long enclosed.” It is difficult for him to establish any sort of connection to it. Even the history of the house feels unkind. The house's previous tenant, a priest, had died while living there. He “left all his money to institutions and the furniture of the house to his sister (Norton Anthology 2236).” It was as if he was trying to insure the boy's boredom and solitude. The only thing of interest that the boy can find is a bicycle pump, which is rusty and rendered unfit to play with. Even the “wild” garden is gloomy and desolate, containing but a lone apple tree and a few straggling bushes. It is hardly the sort of yard that a young boy would want. Like most boys, he has no voice in choosing where he lives, yet his surroundings have a powerful effect on him.
Billy picked his own path to his death. He should have foreseen that this bed and breakfast was not a good idea because it doesn't matter how comfortable and warm the place is, it shouldn't feel like home because home will always be home and it cannot be duplicated. For example, when Billy and the landlady were talking about Mr. Temple and Mr. Mulholland is dead, she mentions “‘But my dear boy, he never left. He's still here. Mr. Temple is also here. They're on the third floor, both of them together.’” this shows that she has both of the guys and they are dead because she has killed and stuffed them to be kept forever. Obsession has completely controlled her mind into not seeing that these beautiful creatures are humans too, just like her and she does not have the right to take their lives for her infatuated obsession over beauty. In the story the landlady indicated that Billy looked familiar to Mr. Temple and Mr. Mulholland. When Billy said his age was seventeen, the landlady said, “‘Oh, it's a perfect age! Mr. Mulholland was also seventeen. But I think he was a trifle shorter than you are, in fact, I'm sure he was, and his teeth weren't quite so white, you have the most beautiful teeth, did you know that?’” in this, she finds Billy looking similar and same age as Mr. Mulholland but she found Billy's teeth better from Mr. Mulholland. There was more and more
The boy is haplessly subject to the city’s dark, despondent conformity, and his tragic thirst for the unusual in the face of a monotonous, disagreeable reality, forms the heart of the story. The narrator’s ultimate disappointment occurs as a result of his awakening to the world around him and his eventual recognition and awareness of his own existence within that miserable setting. The gaudy superficiality of the bazaar, which in the boy’s mind had been an “oriental enchantment,” shreds away his protective blindness and leaves him alone with the realization that life and love contrast sharply from his dream (Joyce). Just as the bazaar is dark and empty, flourishing through the same profit motivation of the market place, love is represented as an empty, fleeting illusion. Similarly, the nameless narrator can no longer view his world passively, incapable of continually ignoring the hypocrisy and pretension of his neighborhood. No longer can the boy overlook the surrounding prejudice, dramatized by his aunt’s hopes that Araby, the bazaar he visited, is not “some Freemason affair,” and by the satirical and ironic gossiping of Mrs. Mercer while collecting stamps for “some pious purpose” (Joyce). The house, in the same fashion as the aunt, the uncle, and the entire neighborhood, reflects people