The fact the he looks back on the incident makes it even more unreliable, which are only reinforced with the fact the puts Fortunates in an unfavorable light through his descriptions of him and his actions, "I suffered him to hurry me to my palazzo” (p. 2 l. 8) In this quotation he describes Fortunate as a burden. Edgar Allan Poe uses both dramatic irony, where the readers perceive things that the character in the story does not, and verbal irony where the characters say something, but mean something else. Dramatic irony is to be seen in the naming of the characters. The symbolic meaning of Montresor is “monster” and the symbolic meaning of Fortunato is “fortunate”. The irony is that Fortunato is not fortunate, as he end up being killed.
Sophocles’ use of irony helps the audience develop the characters of the play. Verbal irony shows the audience Oedipus’s many tragic flaws such as ignorance, pride, and his egotistical attitude. Situational irony showed us Oedipus’s ignorance of his birth parents and of himself. While dramatic irony showed us the actual truth of Oedipus’s wife/mother and of his fulfillment to the prophecy becoming his fate. In the beginning of the play, Thebes is under a horrible plague and so Oedipus sends Creon, his brother in law, to ask the oracle how to end the devastating plague.
William Shakespeare’s Hamlet is defined by its exploration of both great and provocative ideas. As a character of moral conviction, the revenge tragic hero, Hamlet, is isolated by the corrupt core that characterises the court of Denmark, his role as avenger and the morality of revenge, and the shifting notions of appearance and reality. It is these key themes that establishes the moral quandary and ambiguity that lies at the heart of the play. Moral quandary and the notion of revenge are key elements within Hamlet as Shakespeare draws on the conflicting codes of honour evident within Renaissance England. The dramatic device of the ghost, as a figure of Roman Catholic tradition, epitomises the theological tensions present within Renaissance England, accentuating the social paradigms of Shakespeare’s context.
Poe implements obscurity as a mean to make the readers think and creatively connect the dots and solve the mystery that lies in the story. The ambiguity throughout the story interests yet twists and confuses the reader but enables the reader to use their imagination to what happened. Poe leaves particularly the end full of doubts and confusion in order to highlight and unveil the significance of the story’s resolution. This permits the ending to be interpreted as a physical, psychological or moral breakdown of Roderick and Madeline that caused the house to fall. A few paragraph into the story, the narrator already drop a hint about the cause of the eventual fall of the house.
In the play "Macbeth" by Shakespeare, the author explores the many forms of evil and in particular whether evil is from within or is brought to the surface due to the environment in which people live in. For example, Macbeth says "O, full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife." and this could mean that he was born with evil thoughts and an evil nature, or that someone (the "weird sisters" or witches) has planted them there. The seeds of evil, once planted, appear to be nurtured by Lady Macbeth and by Macbeth himself. It could be that he has damaged himself so that he is unable to feel empathy for others - or that the evil is innate.
Hamlet, Claudius, and Gertrude all put up a facade in an attempt to get what they want, and these characters play their roles behind a veil of duplicity. The theme of appearance versus reality gives shape to Hamlet’s, Claudius’, and Gertrude’s characters, as they all try to conceal their true emotions that stem from King Hamlet’s death. Hamlet has been interpreted as a tragic figure due to the poisonous misfortune that is inflicted upon him. It is abnormal that Hamlet cannot find the will to avenge his father’s death immediately. The full conflict of which he feels and keeps concealed within himself is not explained.
Theme in William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” William Faulkner, 1950 Nobel Prize Winner in literature, in his grim, thought-compelling short story, “A Rose for Emily” (1931), alludes to the idea that seclusion can manipulate the mind and persuade it to engage in impulsive devious actions. Faulkner develops this concept by first creating the vulnerable character Emily, who is bestowed an over-protective father, which denies her the chance to blossom as a free woman, then brings death along to steal her only parent’s life which results in odd, arduous coping, and finally exposes this “damsel in distress” to the real world where she experiences unseen hardships and develops a new fond relationship that inconsequently does not work out leading to rash behavior from Miss Emily. His purpose is to depict a supposed impervious, white woman, who strives to assuage herself (due to her father’s death) in the social life of the Civil War, in order to provoke the audience to come to the conclusion that Emily is the typical, dominant white female, but is later revealed as the victim herself. At the opening of the story, the reader is greeted with the death of Miss Emily Grierson and the effect it had on the town. Her funeral was more of a “curiosity”, than a grievance to her fellow neighbors (Faulkner, “Rose” 95).
1. Explain how the characters in William Wells Brown’s novel, Clotel, illustrate an individual’s desire to be free In Clotel or the President’s Daughter, the characters have a tendency to be a great deal too conventional. Brown attempts to place a humane facade on this most vile of American catastrophes in its existence. The propinquity to the stories here are of slave auctions, separation of families, gambling of humans lives, ailing slaves are resold for medical experimentation upon their deaths, suicides and of many more mortifications and brutalities, which no one can accurately describe. In the event of Thomas Jefferson’s death, the novel begins with the auction of Currer, his believed mistress and their two daughters, Clotel and Althesa.
“Is Hamlet less about revenge and more about fear and loathing of female sexuality?” In Shakespeare’s revenge tragedy Hamlet, a number of themes, including remarriage and death, contribute to Hamlet’s harmatia, his fatal flaw. It can be argued that the Hamlet’s hamartia, his fear and loathing of female sexuality, provoked by his father’s murder and his mother’s hasty remarriage, makes Hamlet a play more concerned with female sexuality, than revenge. Shakespeare uses Hamlet as a vehicle for Elizabethan society’s views on incestuous relationships: that to marry any member of your family was wrong, which was based on the Old Testament book of Leviticus 20:21. Gertrude’s incestuous relationship with Hamlet’s Uncle is the main focus of his loathing; their relationship appals him, “...sweat of an enseamed bed stewed in corruption” Hamlet claims their union is unnatural; Shakespeare’s choice of repugnant imagery lends emphasis to his reaction. ‘Enseame’, the fat that is produced from a cooked animal, reflects the repulsion which Hamlet feels towards his Uncle.
The Fall of Fortunato When Edgar Allan Poe wrote his short story “The Cask of Amontillado,” little did he know that it would easily become one of the most criticized works in literary history. A gripping tale of a hatred stemming from countless usurpations, it would be hard to not see an obvious motive for murder. However, as Graham St. John Scott discusses in his brief criticism, the death of Fortunato by the hands of Montresor may delve much deeper than a lust for revenge. He argues that an essence of divinity surrounds the murderer, where an evil surrounds Fortunato. Using Calvinism, he says that this story is not one of cold blooded homicide, but of the classic dichotomy of good versus evil.