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    A Study Guide for Horacio Quiroga's "The Feather Pillow"
    A Study Guide for Horacio Quiroga's "The Feather Pillow"
    A Study Guide for Horacio Quiroga's "The Feather Pillow"
    Ebook41 pages28 minutes

    A Study Guide for Horacio Quiroga's "The Feather Pillow"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Horacio Quiroga's "The Feather Pillow," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJul 27, 2016
    ISBN9781535836531
    A Study Guide for Horacio Quiroga's "The Feather Pillow"

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      A Study Guide for Horacio Quiroga's "The Feather Pillow" - Gale

      13

      The Feather Pillow

      Horacio Quiroga

      1907

      Introduction

      The Uruguayan author Horacio Quiroga's short story The Feather Pillow was first published in Spanish (as El almohadón de pluma) in an Argentinian magazine, Caras y caretas (Faces and masks), in 1907. This brief story uses foreshadowing and horror to create a tale filled with tension. The heroine, Alicia, is a new bride who has wed expecting a fairy-tale kind of marriage. Her husband, Jordan, is pragmatic and cold, but he does love his new bride. Quiroga was an admirer of Edgar Allan Poe, and The Feather Pillow includes the familiar blend of gothic horror, foreshadowing, and mysterious death that readers would expect to find in Poe's short stories.

      There are two important themes in The Feather Pillow: the effect that fairy tales have on marriage and the symbolic meaning of illness and death. In addition, Quiroga teases his readers with clever word associations. For instance, when the sick heroine begins having hallucinations, she imagines an anthropoid—a humanlike creature—crouching on the carpet near her bed. One of the more common parasites to inhabit bird feathers is the arthropod. It is a subtle difference in words, but the effect is to force the reader to rethink the story. An English translation of The Feather Pillow can be found in The Decapitated Chicken, and Other Stories, published in 1976. The story is also available online at several sites, including Project Gutenberg: http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0606301h.html.

      Author Biography

      Horacio Silvestre Quiroga was born in Salto, Uruguay, on December 31, 1878. When he was only a few months old, his father, who had been an Argentinian consular official, died in a shotgun accident. When he was a child, Quiroga's mother and stepfather moved several times. He lived in Salto, Córdoba, and finally Montevideo, where he studied at the University of Montevideo. When Quiroga was eighteen years old, his stepfather committed suicide.

      By the time he was nineteen, Quiroga had begun publishing his first essays in magazines and newspapers, using the pseudonym Guillermo Eynhardt, a character from an obscure nineteenth-century French novel. Several months in Paris during the spring and summer of 1900 increased Quiroga's interest in poetry and fiction. The following year, Quiroga's first book of poetry, Los arrecifes de coral (The coral reefs) was published. In 1902, he accidentally shot and killed a friend. After he was exonerated, Quiroga

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