Dracula and Dracula's Guest - Term Paper

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..almost entirely occur within the first sixty pages." If it is true that the best passages of Dracula are found in the early portions of the book, it would make sense that the first chapter (or was it to be the second?), which later became the short story, was not necessary. Perhaps the publisher / editor who handled the manuscript saw the chapter (short story) as overkill (no pun), since the provocative in-your-face un-Victorian themes were so potent there was little need for an additional chapter that stood well on its own.

In terms of that fact that some of the smoothest, most ambitiously graphic narrative was already in the succeeding chapters, it may have been a coldly objective decision to hold the "prefatory chapter" back for later publication.

Critic James B. Twitchell writes (Twitchell 1985) that Dracula's Guest is "...One of the best werewolf stories ever written." Initially believed to have been intended as the first chapter of Dracula, Twitchell explains, following the discovery of the Dracula manuscript in 1984 "...arguments against Dracula's Guest being a missing first chapter were marshaled." Almost no one today (in literary circles) believes that Dracula's Guest "...was all or part of material removed from the manuscript as it was readied for publication... [it seems to have] only a vague relationship to the novel."

In Dracula's Guest - which today is a respected work on its own, and contains all the salient ingredients to make it a legitimate short story - amazing things happen to Jonathan Harker in third, who finds himself stranded when his driver refuses to continue, and finds refuge in, of all places, a mausoleum.

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There are lines in this short story that rival (but do not necessarily surpass) Edgar Allen Poe's best efforts; "...Her bitter scream of pain was drowned in the thundercrash"; "...this time the storm bore on its icy wings, not snow, but great hailstones which drove with such violence that they must have come from the thongs of Balearic slingers"; "...I remembered...a vague, white, moving mass, as if all the graves around me had sent out the p phantoms of their sheeted dead...closing in on me through the white cloudiness of the driving hail." To his credit, Stoker was genius in this tale of intertwining violent weather with hideous ghostly images."

Critic Brian Stableford writes that even when Stoker got "to the point of beginning an actual draft" of Dracula, "...he encountered difficulties, eventually dropping the open sequence that was later publishes separately as 'Dracula's Guest'" (Stableford, 1998). Stableford also notes that although Dracula is an "untidy...patchwork of documents" and "shot through with loose ends, unsettle questions...such conundrums...are part of the book's very essence."

In conclusion, the truth of the matter, in reference to the pivotal question put forth at the top of this paper, is that Dracula's Guest is all narrative, with no "patchwork" pieces sewn together like the novel presents; there are no telegrams and journal entries and dates of events in Dracula's Guest. And so, it doesn't really seem to fit well, in the novel, and perhaps that is why it was omitted in the first place, which is a solid way in which to end this research.

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