Uses several well-known short stories to illustrate the various elements of fictional writing and their effectiveness.
This paper uses Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado, Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour”, and Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown to demonstrate the importance and effectiveness of techniques such as imagery, symbolism, and the use of a narrator as a character in fictional writing.
The narrator’s voice in fiction is one of the most important elements in fiction for a variety of reasons, as the two works, The Cask of Amontillado by Poe and The Story of an Hour by Chopin clearly illustrate. Poe’s makes his story more dramatic and chilling by using a first-person narrator who not only brings the reader into the action, but is actually the person walling up his friend because he wants revenge for a perceived wrong. The story would certainly have been different if Poe had used third person narration. Not only would it remove the perpetrator of the crime as the only voice the reader knows, it would break up the story by perhaps adding the thoughts and feelings of Fortunato as he was walled up, and this would take away the climax of the dramatic ending of the story.