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

“Suspense is one of the ways you persuade a reader to become engaged and stay engaged with your work.” This is said by Marge Piercy, and gothic writers Washington Irving and Edgar Allen Poe believe in this quote thoroughly. Their use of mood and symbolism in their stories creates a similarity in their style. The authors do have some differences, like in their use of literary devices. The stories “The Devil and Tom Walker” and “The Fall of the House of Usher”, written by Washington Irving and Edgar Allen Poe, have both similarities and differences in their writing styles. Irving and Poe both use mood to craft their stories suspensefully by using methods like imagery. To start with Irving’s story, he describes the depressing character Tom Walker.

As he takes a shortcut through the “thickly grown [swamp] with great gloomy pines and hemlocks… which made it dark at noonday” (Irving Paragraph 4). He uses the imagery to show that the swamp is not the greatest of places, and that Tom taking this shortcut was not the wisest choice in his life full of bad decisions. The imagery also creates the use of suspense to lead the reader to believe something horrific will happen, which does with Tom’s run-in with the devil. Now, to switch stories with Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”. In the first two paragraphs, he introduces the narrator and his motives for showing up at the House of Usher. The narrator is a childhood best friend of Roderick Usher and has been invited to the house to share his final moments with his old pal. As the narrator approaches the once glorious house, he notices certain details, like “the crumbling condition of the individual stones… old woodwork which has rotted for long years in some neglected vault… [and] a barely perceptible fissure,

Poe is a fan of personification, while Irving would rather use more satire in his stories. The narrator of “The Fall of the House of Usher” helps Roderick Usher through his malady through multiple activities, one of which includes listening to him read a poem called “The Haunted Palace”. In which, a “Radiant palace–reared its head” (Poe Paragraph 19). This palace is ruled by a king that is killed and taken over, representing the taking-over of Roderick Usher’s mind. This foreshadowing and the personification of the palace also builds up suspense. Back to Tom Walker, this poor soul has just taken a shortcut through the nastiest swamp. After wandering through said swamp, he runs into a mysterious man. This man is asked by Tom why he is on Deacon Peabody’s property. The mysterious man is about to say that he is dead, then has the audacity to state,“[He will be damned] if he does not look more to his own sins and less to those of his neighbors” (Irving Paragraph 13). The mysterious man, later revealed as the devil, mocks Tom’s statement by saying that Deacon will be placed in hell if he does not pay attention to his sins rather than others around him. This satire creates more suspense that leads up to Tom Walker’s deal with the devil. Both Irving and Poe still create suspense to reinforce their stories, but they both used different methods that are