Facing Reality
Detachment from reality is what the main characters in both Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” and Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” express. “The Things They Carried” is the collection of interrelated short stories of Lieutenant Cross and his experiences throughout the Vietnam War. “The Masque of the Red Death” is the story of a prince who fears the “Red Death” who hides himself, along with some townspeople, to escape from the terrible disease. Each character, despite having two very different roles in their lives, have to face reality. In order to fully understand the relationship between these two works, each of these factors in turn.
Central to both O’Brien and Poe’s stories is the idea that both their
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Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can 't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story”(52). O’Brien’s character, searches for an emotional home, the feeling that he had as a young boy in love, knowing he will never experience. O 'Brien feels deprived of his youth and also feels a sense of betrayal of being forced by his community to be in the war. Each location in “The Things They Carried”, adds onto the detachment from reality for each character. “Love”(31), “The Man I Killed”(82), and “The Lives of the Dead”(153), creates the reality of “You lose some, you win some”(72). O’Brien and Cross experience this when Cross’s love for Martha is not returned, “when he told her he still loved her, she kept walking and didn 't answer and then after several minutes looked at her wristwatch and said it was getting late”(32), while O’Brien’s love for Linda is returned while she teaches him about death. This later made him realize his love “was unreal” to see Linda’s body in the …show more content…
Both of these characters desired love from another human, and “The Things They Carried”, when Cross’ faces where he stands with Martha, his guilt builds up and he reevaluates the decisions he made, whereas when Prospero faced his reality, “he shadow of the ebony clock, gasped in unutterable horror at finding the grave cerements and corpse-like mask, which they handled with so violent a rudeness, untenanted by any tangible form.”(Poe 10), he did not have the time to reevaluate his, but realized his own mask he wore through his own emotions and hiding within his castle walls. Poe also suggests that you cannot hide from the truth. Regardless of this realization of what has been done, Prospero discovers his fear. O’Brien, Cross, and Prospero face their own reality, and ultimately faced the consequences of avoiding
Death is one of life's most challenging obstacles. Tim O'Brien was exposed to more than his fair share of death. To manage the emotional stress, he developed methods of coping with the death in his life. O'Brien's novel, The Things They Carried, demonstrates his attempts to make death less real through psychotherapeutic tactics like telling stories about the dead as if they were living and conceiving the dead as items instead of people.
Written by author Tim O’Brien after his own experience in Vietnam, “The Things They Carried” is a short story that introduces the reader to the experiences of soldiers away at war. O’Brien uses potent metaphors with a third person narrator to shape each character. In doing so, the reader is able to sympathize with the internal and external struggles the men endure. These symbolic comparisons often give even the smallest details great literary weight, due to their dual meanings. The symbolism in “The Things They Carried” guides the reader through the complex development of characters by establishing their humanity during the inhumane circumstance of war, articulating what the men need for emotional and spiritual survival, and by revealing the character’s psychological burdens.
The narrator in “The Things They Carried” deals with the subjective conditions of war. Throughout the story, straining emotions often brought O’Brien’s teams emotions, especially after a death, causes a “crying jag” with a “heavy-duty hurt” (O’Brien 1185). The fury of emotion associated with death begins to erode the sharp minds of the soldiers and become mentally effective. After an event of large magnitude, it still began to take its toll on the protagonist as they often “carried all the emotional baggage of men who might dies” during the war (O’Brien 1187). The travesties that occurred with the brutality of war did not subside and began to affect those involved in a deeply emotional way. The multitude of disastrous happenings influenced the narrator to develop a psychological handicap to death by being “afraid of dying” although being “even more afraid to show it” (O’Brien 1187). The burden caused by the war creates fear inside the protagonist’s mind, yet if he were to display his sense of distress it would cause a deeper fear for those around him, thus making the thought of exposing the fear even more frightening. The emotional battle taken place in the psyche of the narrator is repressed directly by the war. The protagonist in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is also faced with the task of coping with mental
Authors use various styles to tell their stories in order to appeal to the masses exceptionally well and pass the message across. These messages can be communicated through short stories, novels, poems, songs and other forms of literature. Through The Masque of the Red Death and The Raven, it is incredibly easy to get an understanding of Edgar Allen Poe as an author. Both works describe events that are melodramatic, evil and strange. It is also pertinent to appreciate the fact that strange plots and eerie atmospheres are considerably evident in the author’s writings. This paper compares and contrasts The Masque of the Red Death and The Raven and proves that the fear of uncertainty and death informs Edgar Allen Poe’s writings in the two works
The author, Edgar Allan Poe, using illusion or misdirection keeps the reader is suspense throughout this story called "The Masque of the Red Death". Symbolism such as the colored rooms, the impressive clock, the feeling of celebration being at a party all makes this story feel like a fairytale. Poe used this fairytale style and converts it into a nightmare in disguise.
“The Masque of the Red Death” was written by Edgar Allen Poe in the 19th century. This story was written during the Gothic era. The stories that are written in the Gothic era is usually has to do with death, and lots of people were fascinated by the stories. There are many symbols in “The Masque of the Red Death”, yet I chose three, the first is all the colors of the room, second is the ebony clock and the last is the inside and outside of the abbey.
Hundreds of people thought that they were being isolated from a deadly contagion, but it had seemed to find another form of an entrance. “The Masque of the Red Death”, was written by Edgar Allan Poe, a poet from the mid-1800’s, with a wife who had tuberculosis. The short story begins with a lengthy description of the pestilence, which can be interpreted as tuberculosis, that has infested the fictional country. The wealthy Prince Prospero decides to house a thousand of his friends, in order to keep them safe. The artistic home of this Prince has seven rooms, each decorated with a separate color. After five or six months of being sheltered from the contagion, Prince Prospero decides to throw a masquerade ball. As the party progresses, the large ebony clock in the black room chimes, on the twelfth chime, a new guest appears. The rooms turn silent as the ghost of the red death slowly walks through, the fearless Prince Prospero follows
Death, despair, and revenge, these three words form a treacherous triangle to any reader who dare enter the mind of Edgar Allen Poe. In many of his works these expressions seem to form a reoccurring theme. Comparing the works "The Mask of the Red Death" and "The Cask of Amontillado", we will discuss these themes while analyzing the method behind Poe’s madness.
Edgar Allen Poe wrote the short story “The Masque of the Red Death” in 1842. While only one character is actually named, Prince Prospero, the story builds apprehension just based on the descriptions and not on dialogue. The narrator is never named and it is a mystery as to this person’s involvement in the story. The ambiguousness of the narrator also helps build the drama throughout the story. “The Masque of the Red Death” tells the story of a group of wealthy people who are trying to ignore and separate themselves from a terrible disease that is sweeping across their country. The disease is swift and brutal and can cause death within 30 minutes. The people infected weep blood from the pores on their faces and bodies, which causes a disturbing visual image. Poe uses the setting and symbolism to reiterate to the reader that death is inevitable.
The deaths and dangers in the world we face are sometimes made of ourselves and of our fears. In the dark story The Masque of the Red Death the danger being unavoidable death that Prince Prospero shuns away but comes back to kill him. In Young Goodman Brown, the protagonist fears that his faith will be loss and nothing will be good in the world anymore. Both these stories are’ descriptive and use many symbols that connect to fear. While the protagonists in Young Goodman Brown and The Masque of the Red Death are both fearful, Goodman Brown fears of losing his innocence and runs off to find faith but loses it on the way, and the prince in The Masque of Red Death fears losing his riches.
Edgar Allan Poe is one of the most recognized prose poets, short story authors, and literary composers of all time. His works contain trending themes such as love, time, death and the concept of “oneness.” Poe often expressed these themes according to events that he had experienced, and some of his themes intertwined with others. Take for instance, his love for beauty and perfection played a major role in his concept of oneness, or state of absolute fulfillment. However in his short story, The Tell-Tale Heart, Poe effectively explores the power of guilt, and leads his readers through a cynical plot to murder while enduring the struggle to silence a beating conscience by treading the lines of genius versus insanity, moral reasoning versus indifferent resolution, and meticulousness versus obsession.
In The Things They Carried, an engaging novel of war, author Tim O’Brien shares the unique warfare experience of the Alpha Company, an assembly of American military men that set off to fight for their country in the gruesome Vietnam War. Within the novel, the author O’Brien uses the character Tim O’Brien to narrate and remark on his own experience as well as the experiences of his fellow soldiers in the Alpha Company. Throughout the story, O’Brien gives the reader a raw perspective of the Alpha Company’s military life in Vietnam. He sheds light on both the tangible and intangible things a soldier must bear as he trudges along the battlefield in hope for freedom from war and bloodshed. As the narrator, O’Brien displayed a broad imagination, retentive memory, and detailed descriptions of his past as well as present situations. 5. The author successfully uses rhetoric devices such as imagery, personification, and repetition of O’Brien to provoke deep thought and allow the reader to see and understand the burden of the war through the eyes of Tim O’Brien and his soldiers.
The novel, “The Things They Carried”, is about the experiences of Tim O’Brian and his fellow platoon members during their time fighting in the Vietnam War. They face much adversity that can only be encountered in the horrors of fighting a war. The men experience death of friends, civilians, enemies and at points loss of their rationale. In turn, the soldiers use a spectrum of methods to cope with the hardships of war, dark humor, daydreaming, and violent actions all allow an escape from the horrors of Vietnam that they experience most days.
In the story, “Masque of the Red Death” it covers six months during the Red Death.It takes place in a castle which has seven different colored rooms.In the beginning of the story it describes the main character prince Prospero as happy,fearless and wise. Towards the end of the story a new guest appears to the party and everyone is scared and Prospero goes from being happy to mad and in the end the new guest kills Prospero and everyone dies because he was the Red Death. The message in this analogy ,”The Masque of the Red Death “ by Poe is life passes by so quick that you don't realize what's going on until it's your time to die.
Arguably the only social practice that will always recur no matter the time or place is social hierarchy. This is because there will always be an order of importance among people in a civilization. An extreme example of social hierarchy can be seen In The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allen Poe, the story takes place in a fictional kingdom during the middle ages in the kingdom there is a strong divide between the rich and poor. As a plague sweeps through the kingdom the Prince is seemingly unalarmed by the large death toll of his people and feels that he is immune to the illness because he is so much more important socially. The Prince is so unconcerned he throws an extravagant party that only people who are of the same social ranking