Blog Set 11

“The Furnished Room”

                                                       By O. Henry                                 

I thoroughly enjoyed this story, especially since the setting was in a lively part of New York, one of the only cities where every single person has their own drama and own life but become a part of someone else’s unintentionally each and every day.  I found that this story could relate to O. Henry’s quote on the dot. A city, especially one as busy as the big apple is constantly taking in new residents, day in and day out but the buildings remain the same. The short story gave me an eerie suspenseful feeling because in a way it reminded me of how an old mansion would be, with a house keeper who has been care taker for generations and knows all the residents dirty secrets. The fact that the previous residents all left small meaningless belongings behind seemed to have great meaning within the story as they depicted the previous owners even if they felt they were insignificant to their lives. For example, even when the narrator just gets a sniff of the girl whom he is searching for he loses it, knowing that small sense must trace back to her. I wonder what items I deem unimportant and could easily leave behind but another would think otherwise and automatically relate it back to my person.

“The Boarded Window”

By Ambrose Bierce

Whenever I visit my grandpapa he starts to tell funky stories about the past, one that I’ll always remember was how often people were buried alive. I couldn't even comprehend waking up and finding myself underground leading to my accidental death by starvation, suffocation or even just fear but with the lack of education and technology as the current day and era I could see how this would've been possible. Once they realized they were prematurely predicting death a string and bell would often be tied around the corpse’s finger just in case consciousness was regained and they could be rescued. I think the main character might have feared that he would end up burying his beloved alive therefore he procrastinated the process and he withheld his emotions with the hope that she might not actually be gone. Until the panther intrude proved all signs of hope were useless, her body the next day was destroyed and showed signs that she could have indeed been alive, her hands were in a new clenched position, her ribbon broken and the panther’s ear was in her mouth as if she was using her only available self-defense Some supernatural elements were definitely the footsteps, change in temperature, the pressure the narrator felt against his body and how the panther made it into his house. But, if she was alive before the animal attack then who would be haunting the cabin? This story created a lot of questions and possible answers as well as confusion.

“Berenice"

By Edgar Allan Poe

Poe’s story “Berenice” continues with pretty much the same themes that can be found in his other   stories, a sinister mansion in a equally as sinister area paired with a man who is considerably mad but the story is being told from his perspective so you are unsure of what is the actual reality of what is going on or what the mad man believes is going on. The next constant theme is a beautiful woman, who happens to be his cousin, but she is in every way flawless and the narrator associates her beauty with purity, mainly focusing on her teeth, growing a dark obsession for what he deems as heavenly and feels the need to own, to pull out. Which eventually he does. This story also relates back to those who were often mistaken for dead but are in fact alive, Poe often wrote about what the current hysteria of the era were and obviously being buried alive would be a huge one so he wrote to get into the readers mind and left readers with an aching fear of possibility and what ifs.