Compare and Contrast “The Red Room” and “The Cask of Amontillado”
(By H G Wells and Edgar Allen Poe)
For this essay, I have been asked to compare and contrast “The Red Room” and “The Cask of Amontillado”. I will look closely at issues such as the setting, characters and the language used in the stories as the authors work up to the climax. I will also look at the ways in which they create tension with the build up.
SETTING (-To be removed before printing)
The Cask of Amontillado is set in Italy, in catacombs, and underground vaults, already these locations are scary and weird and you can see that the story is spooky and it is going to lead up to a climax. We can get the idea that Montressor is going down when he goes “down a long and winding staircase”. Although they are literally going down they are also going down into Hell and down in Status for what Montressor is about to commit. The Red Room however, is not very different in the fact that, it too is set in a potentially scary place, in a castle. This is obviously a very appropriate setting for a scary story. Castles are normally associated with haunted things and we can visualise the stone brickwork and cobwebs. There is obviously a spooky feeling about the story when “the door creaked on its hinges”.
