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Essay / Research Paper Abstract
A 6 page paper analyzing the way Edgar allan poe and Franz Kafka deal with the subject of the dead who will not die. The stories compared are Poe's 'The Fall of the House of Usher' and Kafka's 'The Hunter Gracchus.' No additional sources are listed.
Page Count:
6 pages (~225 words per page)
File: D0_Usher2.doc
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Unformatted sample text from the term paper:
absurdity that lies just beneath the surface of the everyday world. In "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "The Hunter Gracchus," both authors tackle the theme of the
"revenant" -- a person returned from the dead -- although they tackle it in very different ways. This paper will look at the theme of the undead dead in both
these stories, and analyze how the two authors varying views of life leads to differing views of death. The undead dead were, in fact, a lifelong obsession with Poe. His
biographer Kenneth Silverman recounts that as early as 1831, when Poe was writing his earliest poetry series, a "peculiar cluster of dead-alive persons, still moving landscapes, and deathly dread-longing dominates
not only Edgars three slim volumes of poems but also [anticipates] his entire literary career. Much of his later writing, despite its variety of forms and styles, places and characters,
is driven by the question of whether the dead remain dead. Little of his known behavior during his earlier years . . . indicates much less explains his preoccupation with
this question. But its supreme place in his imagination, and its eventual emergence in his behavior as well, invite at least the attempt to understand its personal meaning to him"
(Silverman, 76). In a surprisingly large number of Poes stories, the revenant theme is coupled with some sense of a double -- two people who somehow blur into one another.
In "The Fall of the House of Usher", Roderick Ushers double is his twin sister Madeline. But there is nothing conventional about this brother-sister relationship. Roderick claims at first that
he and Madeline are soul mates. But their joint existence seems to be bound up as well in the house that gives the story its name. A prominent theme in
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