Comparing and Contrasting

Comparing and Contrasting

Short Stories

"The story of an Hour" and

"The Secret Life of Walter Mitty"

Ashford Student

ENG 125

Stephanie Allen

February 18, 2013

The stories that I have chosen to compare and contrast are 'The Story of an Hour' and "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty". Before analyzing the story, let me define what compare and contrast is. The words compare and contrast have connotations of "pointing out similarities and differences" (Kennedy & Gioia, 1995, p.1756).

I can honestly say that having little experience in reading fiction or poetry I would have to make educated judgments about the story and about its aesthetic worth. However, everyone must start somewhere when considering that making an evaluation is inevitable.

As students we cannot always avoid judging the stories any less than we one can avoid judging the people we meet simply because we do not possess the ability to know what someone else is thinking when they are writing their stories.

While the process at times could be a natural reaction we should all strive in the evaluation of stories and poetry to understand the different kinds of interests it represents, and clarify our own different kinds of values it presents to include our own attitudes, and clarify our own dispositions, and values in responding to them.

Most people read stories for its simple pleasure, entertainment, enjoyment, or even read them for profit. Stories for the most part draw us into their creative worlds and we find ourselves engaged with the power of own imagination. They can provide readers with more than the immediate interest of narrative, and even more than the pleasures of imagination

Whatever the reason for reading there are a number of things that have to happen when a person picks up a book. First, you read more attentively, noticing things you might overlook in a more casual reading.

Second, since reading and writing stimulates thinking, when you write about drama you find yourself thinking more about what a particular work means and why you respond to it as you do. This focused thinking often has the effect of making writing more meaningful to you (DiYanni, 2009, p.1284)

In "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" by James Thurber and 'The Story of an Hour' by Kate Chopin there is a commonality, but there are also differences. Both short stories represent the relationships in marriages through the main characters and the roles that each character plays within the marriage.

In this paper I will try explain the common theme, the symbolism, the tone, and the irony within the stories as well as the content, form, and style through textual evidence in relation to the author's background. Both characters, in their respectable stories, have one main thing in common, a dream.

One factor that a reader can quickly figure out about short stories is what genre they belong to if not obvious from its title. The shorter the work (that is, if it's fiction instead of poetry), the more likely it is to be a short story. So, it is not surprising that "The Story of an Hour" is a short story.

The whole story takes place in the home, so the focus is on the family who lives there; plus, the topic of the story is the loss of a spouse. With a friend's delivery of bad news, Mrs. Mallard's wild crying and emotional epiphany, and her sister's begging at the door for admittance, Chopin's work has the same ingredients you might find in an emotionally charged episode of a television soap opera.

The story chronicles an hour in the life of a young woman in which she faced a many different sets of emotions. "The story of an hour" was written just prior to the last century, certain passions and social acceptance appeared to the reader as timeless rejoinders; some things never change in the realm of love.

However, the unpredictable outcome of this story left the reader to search her own morals and make her own assumptions as to the foundation of the story's conclusion, regardless of the essence of time.

The author led us through the young woman's thought processes by creating intimate scenarios that the reader could feel familiar. The initiation of health information regarding the young woman's heart affliction was an innocent warning to her fragility potential.

Furthermore, while reserving judgment upon the woman's psyche, the author portrayed each emotional element as unceremoniously human. Written with a gentle matter-of-factness, the reader was led through this "hour" with little admonishment towards the unexpected conclusion.

The young woman experienced the assumed death of her spouse by exuding grief, an appropriate and accepted emotion for the circumstance. Liquidly moving us from her grief into a state of suspended emotions, the author's implant of the proverbial "life goes on" was warmly descriptive. The renaissance of nature delicately filled our visual canvases as the author painted the dawning of a new day as the dawning of a new realization to this young woman.

In 'The Story of an Hour', Kate Chopin tells about a young lady, Mrs. Mallard, who experiences the delight of freedom rather than the desolation of loneliness after she learns of her husband's death. Later, when Mrs. Mallard learns that her husband is not dead, she comes to realize that all hope of freedom for her is gone.

As the reader pieces together the fact that Mrs. Mallard has died based on what we know about her, and the shock upon seeing Mr. Mallard, while the narrator's statement that Richards couldn't prevent her new shock. Between that and the doctors' explanation for her death, we realize that Mrs. Mallard has passed away. Unlike her husband's death in the train accident, there's no room for error or miscommunication there. She can't return. The events foreshadowed in the "Initial Situation" have come true.

What makes "The Story of an Hour" an easy story to read and get into is that it conveys the atmosphere and feeling of interesting characters, as well as their time and place, just as a longer novel might. Another interesting fact is that it allows the reader to slip in and out of this short story in no time at all.

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