The Feather Pillow: Alicia’s Transformation! Imagine this situation: day by day, an unknown condition slowly drains the life of a once pleasant wife. This situation is what occurs in the story “The Feather Pillow,” where Alicia is the wife that is being plucked from character, and her husband Jordan, and doctors watch her passing, as they cannot solve nor explain why and how this is happening to Alicia. The author, Horacio Quiroga defines the emptiness, vulnerability, and terror in a relationship where being both disconnected and discontent is completely normalized; which is absolutely opposing to the relationship of wife and husband. The process of the unhealthy relationship in “The Feather Pillow” slowly dying begins with neglect, proceeds …show more content…
At the end of the story, Alicia dies, but more than just Alicia passes away. With Alicia’s death comes the end of the relationship, a hidden reveal of what may have killed Alicia, and the exploration of what the story teaches readers. It is apparent that without Alicia there is no actual relationship between wife and husband as it is only Jordan himself left alone. The narrator states and describes Jordan’s frustration emotionally with the reality of being alone within the seventeenth paragraph of “The Feather Pillow:” "That's my last hope!" Jordan groaned. And he staggered blindly against the table.” (Quiroga, Paragraph 17) The reality Jordan brutally faces with Alicia’s passing is what a majority of people face at the end of their relationship; specifically when two people “break up” or depart from one another. Unfortunately, what would have been extremely helpful to know in order to cure Alicia’s condition is found too late within the conclusion of the story. In the last two paragraphs of “The Feather Pillow,” the narrator states, “...in the bottom of the pillowcase, among the feathers, slowly moving its hairy legs, was a monstrous animal, a living, viscous ball. Night after night, since Alicia had taken to her bed, this abomination had stealthily applied its mouth-its proboscis. sucking her blood.” (Quiroga, Paragraphs 28-29) Whenever Jordan and the servant horrifyingly looked upon this creature, they instantly knew that if the “viscous ball” had been removed from the pillowcase earlier, Alicia still would have been alive. Readers are left to wonder, “What valuable lesson does the “The Feather Pillow” have to teach?” In paragraphs nineteen and twenty, the narrator states two tremendously important sentences for the reader to analyze, “In the deathly silence of the house the only sound was the monotonous delirium from the
readers of their works. Some examples of stories that cause fear in Unit 1 are “The Feather Pillow,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and “House Taken Over.". Horrifying tales like these have many different ways to invoke terror into the hearts of the reader. “The Feather Pillow” is a great example of a chilling tale that throws its frightening element directly into the reader’s face. “The Feather Pillow” by Horacio Quiroga is a good example of a scary story because the main character Alicia gets a mysterious
Gothic theme, gloomy mood, and recurring symbolism. A great example of Gothic Literature is the poem “The Feather Pillow” written by Horacio Quirgoa. ‘’The Feather Pillow” can be defined as Gothic Literature because it contains a gloomy mood, a Gothic Villain, and recurring symbolism. The “The Feather pillow” by Horacio Quirgoa contains a gloomy mood. Throughout the entirety of the poem Quiroga uses adjectives and diction that contain a pessimistic connotation in order to set forth a gloomy mood. For
These elements can be found in the works of countless authors writing such as Horacio Quiroga, Edgar Allen Poe and more recently, Ransom Riggs. Therefore, the works of these authors contain gothic elements that can be related to one another. Miss Peregrines Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs shares similar gothic elements with Edgar Allen Poe’s works The Black Cat, The Raven, and Horacio Quiroga’s work The Feather Pillow. The first work that shares a common gothic element with Miss Peregrines
Many authors use Gothic literature in their common works like “The Black Cat,” written by Edgar Allen Poe, “Prey,” by Richard Matheson, “The Devil and Tom Walker,” by Washington Irving, “The Feather Pillow,” by Horacio Quiroga, and “A Rose For Emily,” by William Faulkner. In effort to create a sense of mystery, suspense, and superstition, these authors use these Gothic Elements: Entrapment and Violence. By using these elements, authors illustrate their belief that one should express themselves through
include the themes of violence and entrapment in their works in order to provide an understanding how the characters react and what they are feeling. Novels such as “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe, “Prey” by Richard Matheson, “The Feather Pillow” by Horacio Quiroga, and “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner incorporate a message of violence and entrapment. Overall, the authors imply these particular themes in order to bestow a sense of the characters emotions and allow the readers to sympathize
did not know how to react, worried, stunned, frightened, shocked, I believed I had lost him. Transformation plays a role in the stories, “House Taken Over” by Julio Cortazar, “Beware: do not read this poem” by Ishmael Reed, and “The Feather Pillow” by Horacio Quiroga, because they all scare us in different ways using transformation. In
In the “Feather Pillow” by Horacio Quiroga, Alicia died by strange means that no one understood. It was later discovered that Alicia was killed by a parasite living in her pillow. The parasite “night after night, ever since Alicia had taken to her bed, it had stealthily applied its mouth… to her temples, sucking gout her blood” (Quiroga 2) and slowly killing her. Within “…five days, in five nights, it had emptied Alicia” (Quiroga 2). In Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar
mystical elements that make up Gothic Fiction. There are many great authors who are well known for their dark gothic style such as Edgar Poe, who has written the short story “Fall of the House of Usher” and the “Black Cat,” or Horacio Quiroga who has written “Feather Pillow” and a more recent author, Ransom Riggs who has written Miss Peregrines Home for Peculiar Children. These three author’s stories all have gothic elements, such as psychological issues, death and fear that parallel one other which
hill with vacant hunger” (Riggs 116). In the short story, “Feather Pillow” by Horacio Quiroga, a man’s wife passes away through a mysterious death, growing weaker and weaker everyday. After her death, he picks up her pillow and finds “Among the feathers, slowly moving its hairy legs, there was a monstrous animal” which caused her death by drawing blood from her head every single day (Quiroga 2). Although the monster in the “Feather Pillow” is much smaller than the monster in the novel, they both
Morgenstern, is a novel that contains several gothic elements within its chapters; these include blood, death, and entrapment. The “Masque of Red Death,” by Edgar Allen Poe, “The Devil and Tom Walker,” by Washington Irving, and the “Feather Pillow,” by Horacio Quiroga, are more examples of stories that also include a specific unique element within each of their original lores. In fact, within Morgenstern, Poe, Irving, and Quiroga’s gothic pieces, certain gothic elements can be compared and are emphasized:
Reading books that we are uncertain about and unfamiliar with will cause an atmosphere of fear because we aren’t certain how the story will unfold. Several stories show that. Those stories are Where is Here by Joyce Carol Oates, My Feather Pillow by Horacio Quiroga, Why Some Brains Enjoy Fear by Allegra Ringo, and In the Fall of House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe. All of these stories have a few things in common, they all cause uncertainty because the readers aren’t sure about the ending of the stories
It is a common belief that when a person falls off a cliff, often times they die before they even reach the ground. The driving reasoning behind this idea is the fact that humans naturally fear change. The idea is that someone who falls off a cliff becomes so scared of the changes that will happen to their body when they hit the ground, that the thought alone overloads their body and kills them. The belief may or may not be scientifically sound, however the root that it stems from is a fact that