Similarities Between The Devil And Tom Walker And The Fall Of The House Of Usher

“I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but triumph over it. The brave man is not he who feels afraid, but who conquers that fear.” (Nelson Mandela) What was trying to be said is that only those who conquer fear are truly more courageous than the ones who live worrying about fear. In both gothic literature texts, Washington Irving and Edgar Allan Poe share the literary element of mood and foreshadowing to create suspense and tension throughout their stories. Also, Washington Irving uses satire in, “The Devil and Tom Walker,” literary elements different from Edgar Allan Poe that uses Personification in, “Fall of The House Of Usher,” to create suspense and tension. The “Fall of The House of Usher,” written by Edgar Allan Poe

The narrator is ridding to Rodrick’s house and describes the tract of land to get to his house as, “During the whole of a dull dark and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing on alone, on horseback, through a singularity dreary tract of country.” (Paragraph 1.) Poe uses words like; dull, dark, and dreary to describe the landscape he is in and how sad it looks as the narrator continues to ride through to Rodrick’s house. The words create suspense and tension because it makes the reader feel scared for the narrator as he goes to the House of Usher and sees the gloomy area around him. Washington Irving also uses mood to describe the suspense and tension going on in the story “The Devil and Tom Walker.” Tom walker and his wife's house was described as, “ A few straggling savin trees, emblems of

When the narrator arrives at the house of Usher he describes it by saying, “I looked upon the scene before me-upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain--upon the bleak walls-upon the vacant eyelike windows-upon a few rank sedges-and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees-with and utter depressions of soul” (paragraph 1) The way Poe uses personification to create suspense is that he uses the house to make it look like it is looking at the narrator causing the narrator to feel uneasy and creeped out. It also creates tension for the reader because it makes the reader fear what will happen to the narrator once he goes inside this house that the narrator describes that is looking at him. Tom's marriage and wife were described as “He had a wife as miserly as himself: they were so miserly that they even conspired to cheat each other. Whatever the woman could lay hands on, she hid away; a hen could not cackle but she was on the alert to secure the new-laid egg.” (paragraph 2) The first piece of satire used is to describe Tom’s marriage and how they conspire to cheat on each other which is not what you do when you marry someone marriage is a pact that you don’t cheat but Tom and his wife do. The second one describes how greedy Tom’s wife is by saying she would horde anything she could find and wouldn’t even allow a hen to lay an egg which