Assignment: Week 10 Discussion FEAR

Introduction: I selected this assignment because it enabled me to analyze the fears created by different writers and focus on literary devices that make these fear-creation methods more successful. By writing about “The Raven” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” I came to realize how fear can be created on an individual as well as a collective level and how factors such as repetition, rhythm, and background contribute towards evoking fear in a person. This assignment represents my progress as a reader and a writer because I have been able to make connections with some literary devices and larger concepts.

Work:

I selected Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” and Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” as both create fear in potent and different fashions. In “The Raven,” fear is an experience that is deeply intimate and solitary. The narrator’s intense sorrow becomes a type of prison from which he cannot escape. Poe builds suspense and tension with repetition and rhythm, particularly with the raven’s refrain of, “Quoth the Raven, ‘Nevermore.'” The imagery, like “midnight,” “bleak December,” and the “silken, sad, uncertain rustling,” signify the fragmentation of the narrator’s psyche and how fear can arise from within.   

In the Irving story, fear is a shared experience in a whole community. The little, superstitious town of Sleepy Hollow gets caught up in rumors, which become scary legends. Ichabod’s fear increases as everyone believes there are ghosts. The Headless Horseman is a composite of social fears and powerful imagination. While both stories deal with fear and anxiety, Poe’s is about internal fear, whereas Irving’s portrays the experience of fear as a communal phenomenon through storytelling and gossip.
Reading poetry and short fiction taught me that fear can both disclose truth and cause harm.The fear has the power to show that some things are part of the self, but the fear can also cause strange or cruel behavior.  I learned about the craft of writing and how writers use tone, repetition, setting, and symbolism, in order to make fear real in both emotion and meaning.