The Undead Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

The Undead - Research Paper Example hemselves are only moderate and somewhat ambiguous, and the emphasis is on those telling the stories and experiencing them being not really sure whether they encountered ghosts with dead certainty (Goldstein, Greider, and Thomas, 2007, pp. 29-31): The drama comes from the subject matter and the manner in which people tell the stories rather than from the extraordinary behavior of the supernatural beings. In the oral tradition, people commonly report merely feeling some type of â€Å"presence†, a cold feeling in the room, or strange noises and nothing more† (Goldstein, Greider and Thomas, 2007, p. 29). The same observation is made with regard to the subtle and ambiguous reality of ghosts as they are rendered in American culture. The take is that in American culture, the reality is something that cannot be fixed with the certainty of fact, but is embedded within the hazy and deliberately ambiguous stories that people tell each other when they relate their experiences about ghosts. This is the case, for instance, in observations of how ghosts are portrayed in American literature that represents the best of American culture through the ages (Lewis, 2005, pp. 33-34): James thus poses, in somewhat clumsy form, the sorts of questions that will bedevil interpreters of his later ghost stories. Was the fathers death a natural result of his anxiety over the fake haunting, or did the narrators tearing of the daughters veil somehow, supernaturally, cause it?... Jamess refusal to answer these questions provides an early example of the workings of what I shall call â€Å"shared fictions† in his later ghost stories (Lewis, 2005, p. 34). Apart from these American cultural artifacts there are also insights to be gleaned in cultural renderings of ghosts in America as they pertain to the conceptions of ghosts reflected in rituals involving the dead and involving ghosts in general, such as Halloween. In Halloween conceptions of ghosts, they are lumped together with witches who