The Fall House Of Usher And The Lottery By Shirley Jackson

In most stories, the setting creates a backdrop for events to come, sometimes the setting dictates the theme as well as behavior of some of the characters. Between Edger Allan Poe’s The Fall House of Usher and Shirley Jackson’s The lottery, both writers were meticulously keen on using setting as a driving force behind the narrative and also set the tone for the theme. Whilst both stories ended with tragedy of the protagonist, both writers chose different moods to ease the reader into the atmosphere of the stories. In Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, Poe in his usual writing style did not beat about the bush before shoving the reader right into a world of horror with the first sentence of the story by describing the day as â€Å"dull,†¦show more content†¦From the narrators’ perspective, The House of Usher was â€Å"mansion of gloom† (Poe 4) that entrapped its occupants and in an â€Å"atmosphere peculiar to themselves and their immed iate vicinity—an atmosphere which had no affinity with the air of heaven† (Poe 6). There is no guessing as to what mood both Roderick and the narrator were in, granted the House of Usher only exhumed an aura of doom and gloom. The Fear in the heart Roderick along with his madness left nothing to the reader’s imagination. Similarly, but on a subtler level, the village folks on the day of the Lottery were filled with a feeling of uncertainty, even among the children who were freshly out of school for the summer season succumb to the fear of events to follow as â€Å"feeling of liberty sat uneasily on most of them† (Jackson 1). In both stories, we find characters in an environment they would rather not be in, but certain circumstances prevent them from leaving at will, clearly conflicted. The battle can be even more difficult when external forces such as your town or your home works against you. In The Fall House of Usher, the Usher mansion served as a major conflict for both the narrator and Roderick. In the narrator’s case, he could have made the decision not to deal with the mysterious even that were taking place at the Usher mansion, but he chose to stay and serve as a companion to his boyhood friend who was in dire need of a friend; to an extent, the narrator was dealingShow MoreRelatedComparing The Lottery and Fall of the House of Usher1119 Words   |  5 PagesLiterature Poe Jackson There are a number of literary elements that successful authors creatively and effectively combine so as to demonstrate their style, technique, and knowledge of writing fundamentals. In the short stories, The Lottery and The Fall of the House of Usher written by Jackson and Poe respectively, the authors depend heavily upon the settings within each story to enhance or explore elements such as mood, atmosphere, conflict, and theme. Jacksons The Lottery takes place inRead MorePsychological Horror : The Mind As The Monster Of The Story1500 Words   |  6 Pagesimagining his escape. Plot twists like this is a very common literature device used in psychological horror. Psychological horror can take the form of a novel such as The Shining by Stephen King or also in short story as is â€Å"The Lottery† by Shirley Jackson. It is a very popular genre that has translated with astonishing success in films. Psychological horrors are written in a variety of characteristics that helps the reader understand what the protagonist is going through. The main componentRead MoreHistory of the Development of the Short Story.3660 Words   |  15 Pagespost-war era The period following World War II saw a great flowering of literary short fiction in the United States. The New Yorker continued to publish the works of the form’s leading mid-century practitioners, including Shirley Jackson, whose story, â€Å"The Lottery,† published in 1948, elicited the strongest response in the magazine’s history to that time. Other frequent contributors during the last 1940s included John Cheever, John Steinbeck, Jean Stafford and Eudora Welty. J. D. Salingers