The Red Room and The Monkeys Paw as Ghost Stories

The Red Room and The Monkeys Paw as Ghost Stories

Ghost stories have been around for hundreds of years and are written

to scare and to excite people. People read Ghost stories because they

enjoy being scared. This essay is about the comparisons between two

quite different ghost stories written by two different authors: - 'The

Monkeys Paw' by W.W.Jacobs and 'The Red Room' by H G Wells.

'The Red Room' is in many ways a stereotypical ghost story, set in a

very big, dark and mysterious building, a castle in the middle of

nowhere, written as a first person narrative. The characters are all

very old and strange. They are all deformed or have something wrong

with them making them quite scary. The author H G Wells is very famous

for writing science fiction novels.

In this story there are three background characters, two men and one

female, all of them old. We are given very vague descriptions of them

so are made to imagine the rest. The three of them are very weird,

deformed characters. One of the men is described as an old man with a

withered arm, the other is described as having a bad cough and wears

an eye patch. No description is given about the woman except that she

is old. They represent the superstitious beliefs about 'The Red Room'.

The narrator is the character that stays in the room. He is described

as a young and naïve. He represents the scientific view of the ghosts.

This story has an interesting twist at the end, because the narrator

decides it is not ghosts that are haunting the characters, but their

own fears.

The three characters are servants for the absent owners of the castle.

They live in the castle to keep it safe. The narrator is in the castle

having a drink with the servants, he is telling the servants that he

does not believe in ghosts and that he has never seen one

"Eight-and-twenty years I have lived, and never a ghost have I seen as