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

Micheal Marshall once stated, “You can’t stop being afraid just by pretending everything that scares you isn't there.” This statement explains fear can be something people try to get rid of by pretending what they are afraid of is not there. Just because one wants to believe it is not there does not mean it is gone. In the short stories, “The Devil & Tom Walker” by Washington Irving (1824) and “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe (1839), the authors use styles in the writing to convey specific moods or effects. Both Poe and Irving use the literary device of mood in their stories to emphasize scare and fear, but Poe also highly uses personification while Irving uses much foreshadowing.

There are many similarities and differences

Both authors use mood to create suspense or an emotional response to evoke the reader. In “The Devil & Tom Walker,” the narrator uses mood while explaining the swamps and the atmosphere of the story. He uses words such as “thickly wooded swamp” and “ill-gotten,” (paragraph 1) to help the reader feel the alarming conditions of the location. When Tom Walker takes the uneasy-looking shortcut through the swamp, he doesn't question his decision until he finds the black man, while hearing nothing before seeing him. The use of mood in the story helps the reader to understand the state the characters are in and to make the connection that something horrifying may happen. Poe implements the same want to put one in the mind of fear. In his short story “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Poes

Poe not only uses the house to display mood, but he also uses personification to describe the dimension of the house to help the reader elaborate on the house and the fear it brings to the narrator's eyes. When the narrator arrives at the house of his childhood friend, he becomes frightened. He explains the house has “vacant eyelike windows” and '' an utter depression of the soul”(paragraph 1), making the house out to be one of a human face consisting of a sorrowful soul that houses are not capable of having. The logic of the narrator's perspective helps the “mere house, and the simple landscape features”(paragraph 1) show the reader the uneasiness one feels only by appearance. Additionally, the narrator feels uneasy while “[he] listened, as if in a dream, to the wild improvisations of [Roderick's] speaking guitar”(paragraph 15). This explains the narrator's disturbed feeling: fear of the guitar, which can't speak, is speaking to him in those moments in which Roderick explains his fear of their family fading away. The use of personification in “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe helps the reader to connect to the feeling the narrator consumes upon arriving at the horrifying house, and the characteristics are human-like to relate the house to a desolate or ill condition person who may seem as one of fear to