Arnold Friend Comparison

Compare/Contrast

A spider, a zombie, a serial killer, all of these things would scare most but why do people pay good money to be scared by all these things? Because people like to be scared. Ever since people could speak to one another, they have been telling these stories. whether it be around a dim lit campfire, in the form of a book, or even on the big screen. these stories stand out through time because of their graphic word choice, unique characters, and suspense. Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Black Cat” and Joyce Carol Oates “Where Are You Going Where Have You Been?” both possess these elements of word choice and suspense along with psychotic like characters such as Arnold Friend (WAYG) and the narrator (The Black Cat). Poe's character the

narrator proves to be much more frightening and menacing due to Poe’s gruesome and graphic word choice.
“The Black Cat” and “WAYG” both posses psychotic like characters such as Arnold Friend and the Narrator, but “The Black Cat’s narrator proves to be the most frightening due to the graphic nature of his actions.

Although Arnold friend proves to be a valid contender of The narrators craziness, this is evident in the beginning of the story where the first thing to come out his mouth is “Gonna get you baby”(2). At this point in the story (Beginning) Connie didn’t even know who he was but yet he lets her know that he is coming for her. Arnold friend, in his gold jalopy, pulls up a few days later just as he promised. Even though Oates uses mental games to scare her audience in “WAYG”, it does not match Poe’s description of violent death. In the “Black Cat” the narrator decides to mutilate a cat by “taking a knife and opening it, grabbing the poor beast by the throat, and deliberately cut one of its eyes from the socket!” (7) This obviously shows the psychotic tendencies of The Narrator: in his drunken state he simply decides to mutilate a cat for nothing but his own pleasure. Arnold Friend is a less frightening character because although he is very disturbed, he only seems to play mental games where as the Narrator uses physical

brutality.
“The Black Cat” is far more gruesome and frightening with its word choice, whereas WAYG has a more less frightening suspenseful tone.

We see examples of Poe's gruesome word choice in “The Black Cat” when the narrator “buried the axe in her brain” (63) after an argument with his wife. When Poe used the word “buried” it really put a grotesque image in our heads of how deep the Narrator got the axe in. This helps fear develop and even stronger angle in the story when the words written by poe can put such a disturbing image in my mind. WAYG proved to be less scary with its suspenseful tone and word choice, where Connie slowly starts to realize “He was older than 30… maybe more” (8) Nervous and doubtful, Connie slowly starts to realize Arnold isn't what he seems. Trembling, Connie realizes that Arnold isn't a 16 year old boy she starts to get frightened and that only makes Arnold more persistent to take her. In “The Black Cat” the narrator becomes irritated with the cat and decides “in cold blood to slip a noose about its neck and hang it to the limb of a tree… tears streaming from my eyes” (9)The Narrator is a known drunk and it seems that he was sober at this moment in time, making the killing more of his doing rather than the alcohol. This is scary to the audience because of the “cold blood” aspect, the fact that he just decided to hang this poor cat for no reason is the most disturbing fact from this quote. WAYG lacks the necessary graphic and gruesome word choice that is

evident in “The Black Cat”: without this, the angle on fear is not as strong. Gruesome word choice is important because when used properly it can put images in the reader's mind that will cringe or send chills down their spine.
Without graphic and gruesome word choice, the true insanity of these two characters would never be able to be expressed; however, “The Black Cat” proves to be the alpha of the two, Poe’s twisted tale of torture and murder proves to be the more frightening of the two. Such violent word choice is crucial to a story like these because a lot of the fear that comes from these stories develops from the shock of violent word choice. WAYG does have very good examples of violent word choice, although “The Black Cat” proves to deliver better word choice combined with a character that is very hard to forget. People fear what they cannot see, and when you paint a gruesome picture of something people are not used to seeing the fear becomes entirely unavoidable.