A Comparison Of Nathaniel Hawthorne And Edgar Allen Poe

Caleb Heald

#96

ENG 123

Dr. Thomas

April 28, 2014

Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allen Poe

“To fear death, gentlemen, is no other than to think oneself wise when one is not, to think one knows what one does not know. No one knows whether death may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man, yet men fear it as if they knew that it is the greatest of evils.” Socrates one of the greek philosophers in the 400’s BC, gives a reasonable question about the fear of death. death affects people and characters very differently in life. in the world of literary works two very well know authors Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe present two works that both deal with the effects of this very thing the fear of death. Laid out in the next few pages we shall see that there are many connections to the works these two have done in the way that their characters are affected by the fear of death, how other characters are affected, and the way that they are personified and how other characters are affected by them, to see that they are a personification of death.

Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allen Poe were both american authors from the eighteen hundreds. both were part of the romantic movement the two works that we are going to look at are considered part of the dark romanticism genre. the first work we are going to look at is “Young Goodman Brown” that Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote in 1835 and the other one is “The Fall of The House of Usher” that Edger Allen Poe wrote in 1839. both of the works have the main character on a journey. they also share that the settings are dark or even that they are evil. have a feeling of death or dread that something is going wrong and that the place they are could hold something very supernatural that could affe...

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...e fear of the unknown. it will and can affect people in such a way that they do not act or react to think the same way a person would who is not being lead by fear of death. both of the characters are set in place that they are going in a certain direction that they can't get off of because they are intrigued by what the end could be it as their stories progress on the see that the end may be closer to their fears then they thought. not until the end of the story do we see the two try to remove themselves from the situation and at this point it has already affected their perspective on the reality and the way they will live out the rest of their lives. we can see this in young goodman brown but only can speculate in the fall of the house of usher. but through the similarities of these situations we can make a fairly certain guess that the end would be very similar.