Both Poe's and Joyce's stories are full with irony, but the settings also supports the characters actions in these damning stories which I find, the harsh truth of reality.


Poe's presents an ironic story with one character arrogant and cruel composition along another character determined to forever silence that character by creating dark, damp setting to indicate the nature of their grotesque personality.  For instance, at the beginning of the story, the Narrator who is bent on revenge of a man named Fortunado who he describes as "a respected and feared man" (3). One evening during a "carnival" season, Montresor comes across Fortunato who wore a "motely...tight-fitting parti-striped dress, and his head was surmounted by the conical cap and bells" (4). Forutnato, a high classed man appears drunk and he could be no better but dressed in a jorker costume suit. As for the setting, the whole town is currently occupied with the entertainment in the town during the night. Fortunato comes to Montresor, drunk as Montresor wants pure revenge for an unspecified insult Fortunato said. Definetly something  awful is going to occur because on paragraph Fortunato is lead into the catacombs by Montresor which are filled with "piled bones, with casks, and puncheous intermingling, into the inmost recesses of the catacombs". Ironically, Fortunato doesn't gripped the suspicion that Montresor is leading him to the "remote end of the crypt...lined with human remains". Why? Montresor did reveal in the beginning of the story he was going to take revenge on a man who implied that this man thought not bad could happen to him, but he can treat people less than the rats of Paris. The reader can easily figure out Fortunato's fate Montresor gave him.

Joyce created also a dark setting supposedly representing the town's people the narrator lived as for creating the narrator "blind" (1) when a young boy who was infatuated a girl whose named he didn't know. First, when the narrator is observing the girl's figure from afar, savoring her "soft rope of brown hair" (4) and "brown figure" (5), the setting of his observation is completely the opposite. There is no sunshine, or blooming flowers. Nope. Instead, this boy lives "an uninhabited house of two storeys at the blond end, detached from its neighbors in a square ground". Furthermore, the town is composed of "dark dripping gardens where odors arose from the ashpits" (4). Not a great supporting setting for a supposed love of the narrator. Third, towards when the narrator wanted to buy a holy gift to his 'love', he then goes on a small mission to buy the gift from the Araby. Going through great pains to buy this gift, he approaches the Araby and see's his love talking to "two English gentlemen" (26) and demands is he going to buy something. The infatuation is smacked right out of the narrator along with his boyish faith. Analyzing the narrator's actions, he didn't' noticed the people around him, ugly along with the dark themes Joyce creates. Only until the end of the story that when he is alone in his house in a dark hall then he realizes "I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; my eyes burned with anguish and vanity". (36). Indeed