In Robert Coates short story ;"The Darkness of the Night" Fred is mislead by his love for Flora because she pretends to be someone that she is not, and he is naive enough to want to commit on her behalf. I will be proving that of how Fred was mislead into committing the murder by evoking certain emotions, the rejection of solution to her problem, and threatening of the relationship between each other.

Flora manages to evoke certain emotions from Fred that ultimately play a part in his final decision to kill Flora’s husband. Flora does not waste any time to talk about her husband; something she knows makes Fred angry: “Always when she starts talking about her husband, Fred would get a feeling of hot helpless anger .(Pg 274)" In this …show more content…

The person she claims she wants to get away from she is now defending and making Fred overlook a perfectly logical solution. This is the time Flora chooses to introduce the idea of murder. Flora gives Fred a newspaper clipping with a story of: “how a woman had confessed feeding her husband almost the whole of two beer bottles, broken up, before the glass had killed him. (Pg 276)" Flora is inconspicuously telling Fred what she really wants him to do. We can clearly see how Flora proposes her own option following her rejection of all the others that Fred came up with. Her manipulation worked perfectly as this idea was bouncing around Fred’s mind until he decided to pursue it. This is also an example of foreshadowing since the clipping is about a woman murdering her husband.

In a final attempt to manipulate Fred into going through with her evil deed, she threatens to stop seeing him. Now that Flora has Fred within her grasp, she still feels that he is not completely committed to undergo the task, so she pushes him further: “You go on the subway. You go on uptown she paused. Goodbye Fred. (Pg 279)" At this point Flora knows exactly what she has done. She deliberately forced Fred to choose between not seeing her anymore and to kill her husband. Fred was so scared of losing Flora that to make her happy he has no choice to eliminate Flora husband so that Flora and Fred can be together at last. Once she realized that she succeeded in