Can you tell me what the summary for "Hop-Frog" is? Plz by 12:00 pm Thursday!

-- Anonymous, October 03, 2002

Answers

A summary without reading the story is worse than useless when the teacher looks a little deeper. However, sometimes Poe's Rod Serling style intros and language can seem a little daunting.

Simply this story is a satirical shocker laced with personal bitterness and many torpsy-turvy references to his other gothic tales. The dwarf and his girl friend serve at a tyrant's court in a circular domed room. The king and his ministers are oafish and insulting. Tripetta spills wine on the king and he lashes out at her to the merriment of all but Hop Frog whose teeth gnashing is a non-verbal signal of savage anger. He plays his jester role by proposing a masquerade "hop-frog" enactment where the king and his ministers are dressed as apes. He gets them strung up and stuck in a line to the ceiling, covers them with pitch, climbs over them with Tripetta. Before leaving through a hole in the roof, he ignites the hapless victims and declares this is his "last joke."

The allegory is very strongly presented that the kings and his ministers represent the publishers or literary world, the world in general that have no appreciation over the creative entertainer(Hop Frog) and have tyrannized him and his wife. The wine dashed on Tripetta(who tripped) is a sign of the bloody tuberculosis that claimed Virginia Poe and his mother. The tale is full references to other famous Poe stories, often reversed. In addition consider the Inferno by Dante, the last circle where they must climb up the monstroiusly dumb, shaggy Satan to emerge out of Hell. The symbolism is crude, the tale harsh and unsophisticated, the humour savage and bitter, itself reflecting an attempt to make a slashing end to his genre writing and subservience to the literary world. Also a pathetically hopeful escape out of this life by both the "little people."

-- Anonymous, October 07, 2002