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According to John Steinbeck “It is the responsibility of the writer to expose our many grievous faults and failures and hold up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams, for the purpose of improvement.” Writers show human failures and short comings or evil thoughts in order to help the reader observe and thus improve his own life before it is too late. The truth of this statement is evident in Washington Irving’s “The Devil and Tom Walker,” and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Oval Portrait.” “Deacon Peabody be damned… if he does not look more to his own sins and less to those of his neighbors.” The devil satirically refers to the deacon as a hypocrite, a person who professes one thing but does another. The devil foreshadows Tom’s downfall by showing what happens, “be damned,” to those who sin. No one is spared not even a man of the cloth. The reader is encouraged or threatened to improve his ways.
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