The Superstitious Man's Story is a great contrast to Night Fears. Night Fears was written in 1924 by the author L.P. Hartley. It would of have been in between World War 1 and World War 2. The readers back then would of have been more immune to violence and horror than the audience of the Superstitious Man's Story, because the readers would of have observed the horror a nightmare of World War 1. Also people started to lose faith in religion as science had started to prove the superstitions were false.
L.P. Hartley was born in 1885 and died in 1972. L.P. Hartley was fascinated by the way different people experienced the world, and his novels and short stories often deal with the difference between reality and what people believe is reality. Night Fears was written in 1934, at the start of the Second World War. L.P. Hartley had often adopted Freudian views and to his work. Sigmund Freud had a profound effect on the way people thought about the way the mind has an effect on our actions. He invented the term 'the unconscious mind', which is different from the 'conscious mind' because it is beyond our control.
Things have changed to alter a modern readers perception of the story. After the Second World War people totally stopped believing in superstitions, as in the horrors of the wars and the horrors of humanity, or worse than the horrors of ghosts.
In a horror story I would expect to see the supernatural play a big part in the story. Death is also a usual scene in a horror story. They usually start off with something or someone normal, performing normal activities, then end with death by a supernatural cause. I would also twists in the plot, with language representing horror and surprises.
Each of these stories conforms to this expectation. The Superstitious Man's Story has a normal beginning and then an ending with death by a supernatural cause. Night Fears has a twist in its ending, where we see the character committing suicide and never knowing who the stranger was.
In this section of my essay, I will be looking at the foreign areas for each story:
- Setting
- Character
- Plot
- Language
- Structure
The first story at I am going to look at, is The Superstitious Man's Story. The setting of the story is in a village in England during the Victorian times. The structure of The Superstitious Man's Story is similar to the tales in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in 1384. Here, instead of a group of disparate characters making a pilgrimage to Canterbury, Thomas Hardy had invented a group of villagers who represented the different sections of society, together with a traveler, who was a device to allow each tale to be told.
There at a lot of characters in The Superstitious Man's Story-each adding something to the plot. You have:
- The Sexton
- William Privett
- Williams wife
- Nancy Wheedle
- John Chiles
- Philip Hookhorn
The characters are stupefacient stereotypes and are an important. The important thing in the story is what happens not who it happens to.
We see that the language in The Superstitious Man's Story use simple vocabulary and are grammatically simple. This reflects the character of the narrator. Words like "curious silent man", "alarm, mystery, queer and uncomfortable, disturbed", suggest to us that unexplainable reoccurrences set the scene. These words also represent horror.
The structure and narrative style of The Superstitious Man's Story is a formed narrative, this means that it is a story told inside story. The storyteller is John Lackland, a returning traveler was told about events in the village during his absence. It is also a third person narrative which means that the narrator is omniscient, all knowing. This story is written to be spoken, as it is spoken by the people in the carriage.
The second book that I am going to look at is Night Fears. The setting of Night Fears
is a person on guard duty on closed road. A coke brazier is mentioned throughout the story. The light had to different negative effects on the guard. The first one was that the guard felt that the light made him a target. The second reason was the fact that it is light, and then it makes everything look dark when he is on guard duty. The coke braziers fire represents its life, his life, as it is starting and it is going to die out, he said, "the fire won't last the night." This relates to the guard because the guard didn't last the night. In the daytime he was not sleeping, and suffered from insomnia.
The first three paragraphs (line 1-43) help as to understand the character and so explains what happens at the end. We learn about:
- His initial impressions of the job
- His attitudes to it now
- His domestic background
- His relationship with his wife
- The night watchman was already feeling the strains of his job in lines 1-43. We see:
- His loneliness
- The vividness of his thoughts
- His difficulties in sleeping
- The lack of things to keep him occupied the night
- The appearance of the stranger in line 50 is both welcome and unwelcome to the night watchman. Early signs of the night watchman's unease were evident when he was practicing what to say.
- The stranger slowly undermines the night watchman's confidence in each of these aspects of his life:
- His relationship with his workmates (lines 82-89);
- His ability to pay for his family's needs in the future (lines 90-114);
- His ability to withstand the strains of working at night (lines115-125);
- His relationship with his children (lines 126-135);
- The memory of his father (lines 145-144);
- His concerns for his own health (lines 151-166).
Night Fears has a different narrative structure and viewpoint.
1. Night fears is mostly told through the thoughts, feelings, and words of the night watchman, for example " he values the brazier primarily for it warmth. He could not make up his mind whether he liked it." (Lines 2-4). This technique helps create tension in the story.
2. Sometimes the author adds comments of his own to the action in night fears, for example, " the night watchman had not mentioned a contract" (lines 163-164 .
3. Night Fears is told in episodes as is the Superstitious Man's Story, but takes place in one place and at one time.
4. The mood and the atmosphere of the story is scary, intimate, matter-of-fact, distant, comfort in, tense, and sympathetic. L.P Hartley managed to achieve this by a short sentences that he used.
Conclusion
Out of the two stories I found that Night Fears is the most effective. It is because the stranger in the story adds a little twist when his identity is not mentioned. Also, it is a more modern story and uses simpler language than the Superstitious Man's Story.
by Josh de Salles
