Grotesque poems Essay

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Grotesque means anything strange, fantastic, ugly, or bizarre. Most commonly used to describe a situation that is ugly, gloomy, dark, or scary. Most grotesque stories involve someone being killed. Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery, Edgar Allan Poe’s Cask of Amontillado, and Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find are all examples of grotesque short stories. Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery is grotesque in a few different ways. The mood can be described as gloomy because it says the men’s jokes were quiet and they smiled instead of laughed. From the beginning you can tell something isn’t normal about this day. The name Mr. Graves is not really grotesque but does kind of foreshadow what is to come at the end of story because it is symbolic of the grave or death. The last and most obvious is Mrs. Summers being sacrificed by being stoned to death. The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe is another grotesque story. The first paragraph talks about Montressor’s anger and how he wants get revenge against Fortunato. Montressor lies to the intoxicated Fortunato to trick him to come down to his fault to get some Amontillado. The vault is dark and cold which gives the reader a grotesque feeling about the whole situation. Montressor leads Fortunato through the vault to the place where he chains Fortunato to the wall then builds another wall in the exit or doorway, leaving him with no way to escape or be found. Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find is also a grotesque story. In the beginning the grandmother doesn’t want to go to Florida especially after she reads about the “Misfit” escaping from prison and probably headed towards Florida also. This really isn’t a grotesque part of the story, but it does foreshadow the ending. The grandmother later wants to visit a plantation that she remembers from her past. She tells the children there is a secret panel in the

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