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Effect of realism on literature
Theme of insanity in literature
Effect of realism on literature
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In reality emotions and perception can influence or change the reality of how the character or person acts and sees things. The stories “Hitchhiker”, “The Tell-Tall Heart”, and “Monster”, are a few stories influenced under the effects of emotions and perception. In each story they show signs of perspective and emotions. From either being insane or to where you hear different sides of a story it changes how the reader/viewer sees the plot line of the story. These three stories have evidence to this statement.
In the story “The Hitchhiker” has evidence towards the prompt. Ronald Adams has decided to leave his mom to travel to California. The another states these evident here “On Adams trip he encounters a man on the Brooklyn Bridge, a man like no other known as the Hitchhiker. Adams sees the Hitchhiker every time he stops but soon or later he constantly sees him.” We have evidence in the story that the author wrote “Then Adams decides to pick up a female hitchhiker and he offers to take her to Texas but Adams tried killing the Hitchhiker and the lady Adams picked up didn’t see him and she found him crazy and left”. Adam finally decides to take a call to his mom in a town in New Mexico. We have evidence in the story “He calls his mom but to his surprises she’s in the hospital from a heart attack from her son Ronald Adams death on the Brooklyn Bridge”. This is a very good piece of evidence to the scenario from Ronald’s point of view in the story there’s a mad hitchhiker after him and makes him seem mad to everyone around, but if the story was played in another point of view such as the female hitchhiker the story would be played in a whole different way.
In “The Tell-Tale Heart” we have a lot of evidence towards being crazy. Evidence...
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...ee from their perspective we would have been given other information and another side to the story.
With the details from these stories we can compare, that the prompt is correct. In the story “Hitchhiker” to us the man seems mad and insane and if we had someone else’s perspective of this story we would see him as a mad man or a dead son. In the story “The Tell-Tall Heart” the narrator sees himself as a sane man who thinks he did right by killing the old man but to us he’s just an insane man who killed a man for no possible reason other than the old man’s eye scared him, the story “Monster” we see Steve as not the killer but to the people in the story he seems a little guilty to the case but in reality he wasn’t involved into the story. These stories have given me the evidence that we need to understand that emotions and perspective can change the reality of life.
Everyday we observe people’s contrasting opinions. Whether it be in politics, school, or in one’s personal life, emotions are often a major factor when it comes to expressing one’s ideas. In writing, an audience must be aware this, and decide for themselves if an author is being bias or equally representing all sides to a situation. In both Into the Wild and In Cold Blood, the authors form distinct opinions about their main characters and believe family structure heavily influenced their future.
Often, when a story is told, it follows the events of the protagonist. It is told in a way that justifies the reasons and emotions behind the protagonist actions and reactions. While listening to the story being cited, one tends to forget about the other side of the story, about the antagonist motivations, about all the reasons that justify the antagonist actions.
The Tell Tale Heart, written by Edgar Allan Poe, and Psycho, directed by Alfred Hitchcock were both formidable, revolutionary and horrifying creations to the audience’s of their times and to some extent, still are today. Hitchcock drew audiences in into his work by utilizing certain camera angles, mise-en-scene and diegetic and non-diegetic sounds. However, Edgar Allan Poe used a variety of literary techniques such as varying sentence structure, imagery and irony to draw his readers in. While these two masterpieces are unique in terms of content, both of them explore a prominent theme, fear.
In Edgar Allan Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart”, Katherine Anne Porter’s “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” and Tobias Wolff's “Bullet in the Brain” these are the type of stories that most readers would enjoy if they are into spontaneous sudden death. In these short stories each one of them has a different point of view. Trying to find out who point of view in these stories can be a little tricky to some readers like in the stories “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall”, or in the story Bullet in the brain.” In “Tell-Tale Heart” most readers can tell who point of view they are reading from the first sentences. Every story has there own tone to give readers a more of a deeper feeling, and the point of view can help us see what the character in the stories see, think, and hear.
Writers may use different techniques to get the same effect out of the audience. In the short story, "Old Mother Savage" by Guy Du Maupassant, a tragic story of a woman who losses everything is told. The story is scary in that it has an ending that one would not expect. Also, it can be looked at as a sad story because the mother seems to be sad throughout the entire story. At the end the only thing that she has to be satisfied about is that her murdering four young men can make other women feel how she felt when she found out about the death of her son. This story can be compared to Edgar Allen Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart", when you talk about the strategies that both authors use to make the audience frightened. They both describe scenes in full detail to give the effect of disgust. However, Du Maupassant, makes the audience feel sorry for the mother in this story turning it into a tragedy instead of horror.
The most prominent example of this is the imagery of the wallpaper and the way the narrator’s opinion on the wallpaper slowly changes throughout the story; this directly reflects what is happening within the narrator’s mind. At the beginning of the story, the narrator describes the wallpaper as “Repellent.revolting. a smoldering unclean yellow” (Gilman 377). As the story continues, the narrator starts to become obsessed with the wallpaper and her opinion of it has completely changed from the beginning. Symbolism plays a big part in “The Yellow Wallpaper” too.
The killer’s plan in the “Tell-Tale Heart” actually works and is able to hide his actions for a long time. While in “The Lottery” the town is peaceful and everyone is going through their daily lives. People seem excited for the lottery and seems that something positive will occur. But in the end for both of these stories bad things happen towards the people in the story. The killer has guilt get to him and he confesses that he is a murder. While in the lottery is actually a dark event that makes whoever wins becomes a sacrifice. The 2 themes both tell the story of death. They are both terrible stories, but tell people important themes. One is that you shouldn’t do something without understanding why you are doing it. Secondly is that guilt will always come back to haunt
In “The Tell-Tale Heart”, a man opens up by saying that he will defend his sanity yet confessing that he has killed old man who he takes care of. The police show up and ask him if he knows anything about the screams the old man had made. He tells them no and they believe him. In the end he hears them talking and laughing and assumes that they are mocking him and know that he is lying. He ends up confessing his crime and telling them that the body of the old man is under the floorboards.
Many people who have read “The Tell Tale Heart,” argue whether or not the narrator is sane or insane. Throughout this paper I have mentioned the main reasons for the narrator being sane. The narrator experienced guilt, he also was very wary executing the plan, and the intelligence level of his plan to murder the old
In "The Tell-Tale Heart", the storyteller tells of his torment. He is tormented by an old man's Evil Eye. The storyteller had no ill will against the old man himself, even saying that he loved him, but the old man's pale blue, filmy eye made his blood run cold. And when the storyteller couldn't take anymore of the Evil Eye looking at him, he said, "I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye for ever." This is the start of the storyteller’s madness, and as the reader listens to what he says, the madness within the storyteller becomes very apparent.
The narrator in “The Tell-Tale Heart” is not guilty because of reason of insanity. Although the narrator claimed that he was not mad, he acted like it. He even thought that the old man had an “Evil Eye” that was vexing him. He actually seemed proud, and sounded like he was very confident, acting as if he was better than “mad” people. He is insane.
E. Arthur Robinson feels that by using this irony the narrator creates a feeling of hysteria, and the turmoil resulting from this hysteria is what places "The Tell-Tale Heart" in the list of the greatest horror stories of all time (94). Julian Symons suggests that the murder of the old man is motiveless, and unconnected with passion or profit (212). But in a deeper sense, the murder does have a purpose: to ensure that the narrator does not have to endure the haunting of the Evil Eye any longer. To a madman, this is as good of a reason as any; in the mind of a madman, reason does not always win out over emotion. Edward H. Davidson insists that emotion had a large part to play in the crime, suggesting that the narrator suffers and commits a crime because of an excess of emotion over intelligence (203).
...levator, and The Hitchhiker by, all show that emotions can influence a person’s reality. In Monster by Walter Dean Myers, Steve sees everything that happens around him as a movie so he can escape his reality. In The Tall Tale Heart by Edgar Allen Poe, the main character is so uncomfortable with the old man’s eye that he murders the old man. In The Hitchhiker, Adam is so convince that the old man is a ghost so he is afraid of him when really, Adam is the ghost. Due to those stories, emotions can affect someone’s reality very significantly. In The Elevator, Martin thinks that the old lady is going to eat him, but she’s just looking at him. Emotions even change people’s perceptions in real life too, an example is when you’re home alone and you hear a random noise in your house, because of these reasons, emotion can, and do change a person’s perception about reality.
Madness is relative. The sanity of the narrator in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart is best approached from two sides. One of which are from the narrator’s point of view, and the other is a neutral perspective. This is a man who stalked another, murdered him, and covered his traces only to be harassed by his victim’s heartbeat. With the narrator’s consistent denial of his madness, his homicide and overwhelming guilt is what induced his severe paranoia and apparent insanity. However, his actions were committed through fear, while his story affected by false memory and trauma. The narrator’s experience shows how a truly traumatic event can prove to completely destroy and alter any man’s sanity.
It is a story that provides the ultimate explanation of how two different people who are witnesses to a crime give completely different psychological recollections of the same event. The author reminds us that truth depends on the telling. Someone must step forward and tell that truth.