An Essay Comparing ‘The Red Room’ and ‘The Monkeys Paw’ Ghost stories have been around for hundreds of years and are written to scare and to excite people.

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An Essay Comparing 'The Red Room' and 'The Monkeys Paw'

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.
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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 yet" the narrator is choosing to ...

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