Quintessential Elements of Grotesque and the Burlesque Essay

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quintessential elements of grotesque and the burlesque in Edgar Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher. The author opens the story with the description of a dreary environment. "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"(1846). This introduction is reason enough for an instinctive reader to pre-empt the nature of things to unfold. He goes further to explain the landscape, the haunted house, "….upon the bleak walls - upon the vacant eye-like windows - upon a few rank sedges - and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees…"( 1846). Moreover, there are many other indicators of grotesque elements including the author's description of Roderick and his sister's health conditions. He goes into detail on Madeline telling of the feelings she evokes on him. Nonetheless, the vagueness in the story is also indicative of grotesque features, the reader is left to wonder where the story takes place. The narrator seems to be a Roderick's personal friend yet he knows little about him, he did not know about Roderick's twin sister.

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In The Black Cat, the author uses a style that explores fear and obsession with the unknown. The author details the narrators deteriorating mental health demonstrating lack of self-control; this is a revelation of one's own fear as that of the unknown. He starts of by saying "Mad indeed would I be to expect it, in a case where my very senses reject their own evidence. Yet, mad am I not" (3), however his account reveals a strange spirit of perverseness that is even strange to himself. In addition, other elements of grotesque are evident in the superstitious blurring of the difference between reality and the fantasy, "…to the character of the mark of white hair, of which I have spoken, and which constituted the sole visible difference between the strange beast and the one I had destroyed" (10) The narrator claims that shape of the noose was imprinted on the new cat. Nonetheless, the tittle of the story suggest grotesque elements as it symbolizes superstition the narrator mentions that his wife….....

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