Edgar Allan Poe's Tell Tale Heart and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Adventure of the Speckled Band

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Edgar Allan Poe's Tell Tale Heart and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Adventure of the Speckled Band Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe, both authors who are eminent for the content of their stories, wrote about crime. Though they invented stories concerning crime, they both wrote through different perspectives. This essay is going to compare how the characters of both stories, 'Tell Tale Heart' written by Poe, and 'The Adventure of the Speckled Band' written by Doyle, have been portrayed differently by their authors as well as exploring into the language style of the two stories. The historical backgrounds of both authors have influenced the way their stories are written. Poe was seen to have an unstable life as his mother died at and early age of three, and after that he was taken into a foster home of John Allan. He was educated at the University of Virginia. Later he went through a quarrel with his foster father and left home. He served in the U.S. Army under a false name, Edgar A. Perry, and incorrect age and then attended West Point from 1830 to 1831 but got himself dismissed when he realized he would never be reconciled with his foster father. He wrote Gothic novels, which is a type of fiction, written in reaction to 18th-c rationalism, that reclaims mystery and licenses extreme emotions. His third volume of poetry brought him neither fame nor profit but in 1833 he won a prize for best short story. From 1844, he settled down in New York as an editor and all this while he was gaining some reputation for his short stories, poems, reviews, and essays, such stories as "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839), "Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), and "The Gold bug" (1843), would later be regard... ... middle of paper ... ...e of the Speckled Band,' it could be seen that they both follow a formulaic plot, but the authors accentuate on different parts of the plot, such as the problem or development, in different proportions, either emphasizing more or less on it. For example, Poe emphasizes the self-obsessive actions and feelings of the protagonist in the development more than the others, whereas Doyle emphasizes more on the problem, which is discussed between the client and Holmes. In Doyle's stories there are many characters, which are significant in the plot in their own way, such as Holmes, Watson, the convict and the victim, whereas in Poe's stories the protagonist is the victim himself. The language is intricate, in both stories, from their own point of views, but because of Holmes' logical reasoning behind everything and Poe's self-obsessive actions, it does not seem so.

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