Answer:
The Feather Pillow
In Horacio Quiroga’s The Feather Pillow, the author presents a narrative that could be classified as falling within the genre of short horror fiction. Nevertheless, Quiroga’s work, despite the plot that involves a strange animal ultimately killing one of the two protagonists, should not be dismissed as a mere work of pulp fiction. Rather, The Feather Pillow demonstrates a masterful crafting of the conventions of horror literature in an original manner. Whereas the suffering and ultimate death of the character Alicia is portrayed throughout the story as caused by a possible psychological condition, Quiroga reveals an entirely different reason for Alicia’s death, as a parasitic animal is discovered to have induced the latter. In other words, Quiroga’s horror can be considered to be a rigorously realistic horror, one that does not appeal to the supernatural, while also employing dramatic psychological effects only as a type of ploy that disguises the very real and ultimately mundane causes for the narrative’s central tragedy. Accordingly, Quiroga attempts to construct a narrative in which the reader infers some type of psychological logic behind the central conflict of the story. Hence, the initial marriage of the two main characters, Jordan and Alicia, is portrayed in idyllic terms at the outset of the text. Their love is a wholly reciprocal love, as the author makes clear: “She loved him deeply….He too loved her deeply, but without letting it show. For three months – they had married in April – they live in singular bliss.” (2-3) Whereas the mutual affection of the protagonists is displayed at the outset, Quiroga provides some intimations that the subsequent tragedy in the story will be a result of Jordan’s character. His stance of a certain coldness towards Alicia, despite his explicit love for her, infers to the reader that Alicia’s subsequent illness will somehow be the result of Jordan’s own psychology in terms of the manner in which he conveyed his feelings towards her.
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