Compare and Contrast Two Short Stories From Different Time Periods Essay

But from the same genre In this essay I will compare the pre 20th Century text â€Å"The Black Cat† (1843) by Edgar Allen Poe and the post 20th Century text â€Å"Hell’s Event† (1984) by Clive Barker both of which are horror stories. Edgar Allen Poe was born in Boston, USA in 1809. He had a brother, Henry, and a sister, Rosaline. In December of 1812 the children were orphaned and the family was split up. Henry stayed in Baltimore with his grandparents. Edgar and Rosaline Poe were taken in by wealthy Richmond families, Rosaline by the Mackenzies and Edgar by the Allans. In 1827 prior to enlisting in the army Edgar wrote his first two poems known as â€Å"To Margaret† and â€Å"To Octavia†. By 1833 Edgar had begun to write stories and in 1835 he married his cousin, Virginia but she died 12 years later. On 7 October 1849 at about 4.30pm Poe died. The actual cause of death at the relatively young age of 40 has never been confirmed. Poe was buried in his grandfather’s lot in the Westminster burying ground. Throughout his life Poe had been victimised and taken advantage of and I think this may have influenced some of his texts. Clive Barker was born near Penny Lane, Liverpool in 1952. After attending junior school in that city, He entered Liverpool University to study English literature and philosophy. At the age of 21 he moved to London. There, he formed a theatre company to perform plays that he had written, and worked in that medium throughout his twenties as a writer, a director and an actor. About himself, Clive writes: â€Å"My enthusiasm as an artist is rooted not in any particular medium, but in the act of imaging. My books, films, drawings and plays, thought they may seem to be very disparate in content, are still mapping out different parts of the same landscape: that is to say, the world between my ears, I am motivated to write or paint by the images and scenes which arise from my subconscious, without invitation, which seems on closer inspection to dramatize elements of my deeper self. Unlike Poe, Barker didn’t have an unhappy childhood and had a good university education and as he says above he uses thoughts form his subconscious to influence his experience rather than as perhaps in Poes case, perhaps real life events. Hells event is about a race between Heaven and Hell to see which will be in power for the next hundred years, the contenders for Heaven don’t know about the importance of the race, they think it is just another race. There are four contenders for Heaven, Nick Loyer, Joel Jones, Frank McCloud and Lester Kinderman. The contender for Hell is Malcolm Voight although he is actually three people, he is one of three familiars from hell, the idea being that they all run a one third of the race, Burgess is the familiars master and he appears quite a lot in the story as does hell itself. Joel Jones is one of the main characters in the story, as is Cameron, his coach. Joel is killed towards the end of the race and it looks like Voight is going to win. But just before the line he is taken over by Kinderman. The Black Cat is about a man who used to be an animal lover and had a large variety of pets including birds, goldfish, a dog, rabbits, a small monkey and a cat called Pluto. Over the years the man grew moody and irritable and swore and hit his wife, he neglected and ill-used his pets all except Pluto. But as the man got steadily worse he started mistreating Pluto. Eventually the man hung Pluto from a tree and on that night his house burned down. The man survived and the morning after the fire came back to the ruined house to find an image of a gigantic cat with a rope round its neck imprinted on the wall. One night the man was sat drunk in a pub and he saw sat on a hogshead of gin a cat that looked just like Pluto apart from a splotch of white covering part of its body. The man found that the creature had no owner and so took it home. The man soon started hating the cat as he had done with Pluto. Eventually the man kills his wife whilst trying to kill the cat and is caught by the pol ice. In my opinion there are three main protagonists in Hells Event. Joel Jones is one of these three, Joel is a sympathetic character, and we are shown that he is a sympathetic or good character from the beginning of the story, at the start of the race Joel is scared because he has had bad dreams this immediately tells the reader that Joel is a sympathetic character. If Joel had been an unsympathetic character he would probably not be scared by a bad dream! Joel is superstitious as he has a good luck charm, which also shows the reader that he is a good character. Later in the story Voight calls Joel a â€Å"black bastard†, which increases the readers liking of Joel and has the opposite effect on the character ‘Voight’. The Author makes us like Joel by making us feel sympathetic towards him in this way. Another of the three characters is Cameron, Cameron is another ‘Good’ character, he is Joel’s coach. It is not obvious from the first page that Cameron is a good character, on this page Cameron is cursing because he can’t get a signal on his radio, and so the reader is not sure whether Cameron is a nice character until the second page where he is comforting Joel but comforting him in his own sort of non-sympathetic way for example Cameron says â€Å"They love you, God knows why – they love you†. The third main character in Hells Event is Burgess, even before you know his name you know that Burgess is an at least a nasty if not evil character, the first thing he says in response to Cameron saying, â€Å"What the hell is going on† is â€Å"Precisely that Mr Cameron hell is going on†. This is quite a witty yet nasty thing to say, also Burgess is wearing a goat skin coat which still has the hooves and horns hanging from it, this emphasizes the fact that Burgess is a bad and un-sympathetic character, a good character would be very unlikely to wear this sort of coat. Clive Barker has tried to make burgess more horrifying by describing the coat in detail, he says ‘He wore a coat apparently made of several goat-skins. The hooves and the horns still hung from it. The blood on its fur was brown and gummy.† On page forty-five about halfway through the story Burgess admits that he works for hell. The very fact that he works for hell will tell the reader that he is an evil character. Although Burgess is an evil character some of the things Barker writes, which Burgess says are quite witty and funny. In The black cat there are also three main protagonists The two cats and the man who tells the story, which is told in first person whereas Hells Event is written in third person. You never actually learn of the mans name, so for the purpose of this essay I will refer to him simply as ‘The man’. Also you never learn of the second cats name and so I will refer to him as ‘The cat’. The man who tells the story is a good character at the beginning, but as the story goes on he gets more ill tempered and violent until at the end of the story he is a violent character. The story starts after it has ended, with the man who must be in prison, writing about what has happened to him. It makes the reader feel sorry for him, he tells us that he is going to die tomorrow which makes us feel sorry for him. He also writes, â€Å"My immediate purpose is to place before the world, plainly, succinctly, and without comment, a series of mere household events. In their consequences, these events have terrified – have tortured – have destroyed me†. Poe makes the words have more empathy by using repetition e.g., â€Å"have terrified – have tortured – have destroyed me†, the words getting more disastrous every time. Then the story properly starts, with the man describing how he grew up loving animals and being tender of heart, he describes how he had lots of animals, which he loved this turns the reader to thinking that the man is kind and wondering why he was about to be killed at the start of the story, which makes you want to read on. As the story goes on the man starts to get violent towards his pets and eventually kills them all, including Pluto his character gets more violent and Poe shows this by describing how the man feels at that point for instance he says â€Å"The fury of a demon instantly possessed me. I knew myself no longer. My soul seemed, at once, to take its flight from my body.† There isn’t much that I can write about the cats as they don’t actually say anything, but Poe makes us feel sorry for them, and in turn makes us hate the man more by describing in graphic detail how they are mistreated. For instance he writes â€Å"I took from my waistcoat pocket a pen-knife, opened it, grasped the poor beast by the throat, and deliberately cut one of its eyes from the socket.† Barker also uses this technique in hells event as I have written above. The first paragraph of ‘Hells Event’ is written in the past tense, you can tell by the way dates are mentioned that this is so. E.g. ‘Hell came up to the streets and squares of London that September, icy from the depths of the ninth circle’, it says ‘that September’ which means, the September that has been. After that paragraph though the story goes into the present tense, as if the events were happening now, for example mike who is one of the race commentators says â€Å"And what a day it is†. As if it is happening today. The storyteller is an omniscient narrator, for instance he knows that Joel feels ‘sick in the pit of his stomach’ and that Cameron ‘smelt a fix’ when he saw Voight’s double. Using an omniscient narrator has advantages because it enables the writer to explain how a character is feeling. In ‘The Black Cat’ the tenses are written in the opposite way to hells event, the first paragraph is written in the present tense where the man is probably in jail and is writing the story of how he ended up in his present situation. You can tell because of how the first paragraph is written, for example, â€Å"But tomorrow I die and today I would unburden my soul†, by reading this a reader can work out that he is writing in the present. After this paragraph he starts reading the story he has written, which is in the past tense, and uses words like ‘was’ and ‘were’ which are in the past tense. These are used in sentences like; ‘Pluto – this was the cats name’ and ‘my pets of course were made to feel the change in my disposition.’ Because the man writes his story in first person he can tell the reader his thoughts, you could say he is an omniscient narrator, but then again he does not know the thoughts of t he cats. There are quite a few differences in The Black Cat and Hells event in terms of technology and change over the years, these include: Hogsheads of gin, which are no longer used Servants, the only people who still have servants now are the extremely wealthy and royalty. Gallows, These used to be used for putting people to death. Radios, Not invented in the 1800s Cars, Cars were not around in the early 1800s. There have been lots of changes in spelling and punctuation since The Black cat was written, for example the line ‘I even offered her personal violence’, which the man uses to express how he treats his wife would not be used today, today a more direct approach would be used for instance you might use ‘I even hit her’ which is a lot more to the point. Some words have completely new meaning, nowadays a word like dress which is a garment usually worn by a woman, but in the 1800s it meant the clothes that a person was wearing. The choice of words, which authors use, has change since the 1800s. For example in the 1800s Poe used ‘I suffered myself to use intemperate language to my wife.’ Which means the man swore at his wife, but in Hells Event barker just simply uses the actual words, which express his characters feelings more, for example, â€Å"Shit, said Cameron as he was plunged into darkness.† Shorter words are now used instead of longer more difficult ones like intoxicated which means drunk and felons cell, which means prison. There is no open speech in The Black Cat; instead there is reported speech. In this story there are lots of things that would not be written today, e.g. ‘Pluto – this was the cats name – was my favourite pet.’ Would be written today as ‘Pluto (this was the cats name) was my favourite pet.’ I preferred hells event to The Black Cat because there was a bit more detail which made it more horrific, like the part where Joel is killed, ‘Joel felt the last of his strength falter: his arm could keep the mouth at bay no longer. Despairing, he felt the teeth at his brow and at his chin, felt them pierce his flesh and his bone, felt, finally, the white night evade him, as the mouth bit off his face.’ Also The Black Cat is harder to read because a lot of words in it are no longer used. Both story’s were good and I like the horror genre in general anyway so I enjoyed reading the story’s.