Juxtaposing the Most Similar Contradiction in Edgar Allan...

Throughout all of Edgar Allan Poes works are common ideas that oppose each such as madness versus sanity, reality versus the imagined reality and life versus death. Usually these sentiments are taken as contrasting ideas with little similarities to each other, like black and white. However, many of these motifs are situated in the grey category. Poe uses the communal thought pathway to highlight its antithesis; the pathway of grey. With the new pathway, he emphasizes the similarities of the opposing ideas until they meld into one solid grey idea. One without the other is nothing more than absolutely nothing at all. Poe creates the grey to both discredit society’s division between black and white and to stress that the first perception is†¦show more content†¦Edgar Allan Poe also used some irony to show the same idea. Hop Frog uses the king’s life, in which he lived on jokes, to â€Å"arrang[e] his last joke, one which the king clamor[s] for, [the one] in which the king dies† as stated in the Critical Companion to Edgar Allan Poe (Sova 81). The king’s life of jokes is spent, and Hop-Frog’s jokes have a deathly ring to the king. The irony again illustrates how intertwined the two opposites are. Irony is also present in the short story â€Å"Masque of the Red Death† to highlight the connection between life and death in a different way. The theme within â€Å"Masque of Red Death† is presented in the opposite way, instead of showing that life needs death, it displays that life cannot escape death. In this story, the nobles of an area attempt to escape the effects of the sickness the Red Death, all the while allowing death easy pickings. While, for some time the people are able to isolate themselves from death, the personified character of death makes an anticipated visit. At the arrival of the masked man, who has the visage of a corpse, the characters have begun to understand that death had come to get them at last. In the story, death is synonymous with the outside as proposed by Martin Roth in his article in the University of Wisconsin Journals. Roth describes the Red Death as â€Å"an invader from the outside† solidifying the idea that escape is futile (Roth 50). Had death been