Tragedy & Ambition: A Comparative Study of Macbeth and Dark Places

Macbeth by William Shakespeare, is a play about ambitions, taking control of one’s life causing a great tragedy. Meanwhile, Dark Places by Gillian Flynn is a novel about how the Day family is affected by a tragedy. One of these is a play and one is a novel but, the stories are both about how a tragedy affects one’s life. Although Macbeth and Dark Places are both centered around tragedies, they have different narratives and over all different styles of writing.

Macbeth and Dark Places are both about tragedies, although they both take different turns during the telling of the story the plot is relatively the same. In Macbeth, the main character, Macbeth, ascends and descend from power, and ends up dead after following them and allowing his ambitions

Macbeth is a play written by a poet. Shakespeare’s first love was poetry and before Shakespeare wrote plays he wrote poems. Macbeth was written around 1606, during which time James 1 of England, formerly James IV of Scotland, was in rule. It is believed that Shakespeare was friends with James and Macbeth takes place in Scotland to honor him. As Macbeth is written by a former poet Macbeth is written in poetry and to end each scene Shakespeare used rhyming couplets. The rhyming couplets are composed of two lines of equal length that complete one thought and tell the audience that a scene is ending. Dark Places was written by Gillian Flynn a novelist that loves writing about dark mysteries. Although Flynn wanted to be a police/crime reporter she didn’t have the guts for it, and later became a fiction writer; mainly writing about mysteries. Most of Flynn’s books take a dark twist that relate back to things she heard or read about during her childhood like, the book In Cold Blood by ____. In Cold Blood was a book about dead bodies being found in a farm house, giving Flynn the idea for Dark Places. Dark Places does not use poetry but instead it uses imagery, symbolism and metaphors such as “____” (Talk about the quote) Macbeth and Dark Places have different writing styles due to the type of writing the writer preferred and the time period the writer

They have similar plot lines, about tragedies and differences about the way they are narrated and written. Both stories talk about tragedies but Macbeth is a play about ambitions that uses poetry and Dark Places, is a novel about the Day family in which the narrators uses imagery. One of these is a play and one is a novel but the stories are both about how a tragedy affects one’s life. Although both Macbeth and Dark Places talk about tragedies, their different narratives cause them to have different writing