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Student Essay on Yellow Wallpaper and Story of an Hour

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The Yellow Wallpaper Summary

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Yellow Wallpaper and Story of an Hour

Summary:   Two very great short stories are " The Yellow Wallpaper." by Charlotte Perkins Gilman which was written in the year 1892 and "The Story of an Hour." by Katie Chopin which was written in the year 1894.


The Short story EssayWhen comparing and contrasting two or more works of literature at the same time we should be able to describe both works or literature, show the similarities and the difference. In order for a writer to show such qualities he or she must have a very good and clear understanding of the work of literature in question because with out it the writer would not be able to recognize the Narrative point of view and most importantly the author's point of view of the whole story. The reason I write this paper is to compare and contrast two very great short stories which are " The Yellow Wallpaper." by Charlotte Perkins Gilman which was written in the year 1892 and "The Story of an Hour." by Katie Chopin which was written in the year1894. Both stories will be discussed with details in the preceding paragraphs.

"The Story of an Hour" was a very interesting story. It is highly descriptive to a point where she threw me off when she says 'There was something coming to her ... ; it was to subtle and elusive to name. But she felt it creeping out of the sky, reaching toward her through the sound, the scents, the color that filled the air.'(P 525) yet very brief and straight to the point. The ending of the story wasn't predictable to me but I could sense that the main character Mrs. Mallard was very near her death in other words that she was going to die at the end of the story. The Narrative point of view the author used is a Non participant point of view because the narrator of the story was not any of the characters

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Mentioned which is the major reason why the narrator can describe all the characters very well and see into the mind of one or more characters. The narrator is also omniscience because he can go in and out of the story. Since it is a Non participant narrative point of view it is written most of the time in the third person. This affects the story because if the narrator is not omniscience the writer wouldn't be able to tell us how things were going on down stairs while the main character locked her self in her room or how reluctant they were to give her the bad new about her husband.

"The Yellow Wallpaper." was also very interesting but it was very boring and slow at the beginning because of the long complex sentences used by the writer like 'If a physician of high standard, and one's own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression-a slight hysterical tendency-what is one to do?'. "The Yellow Wallpaper." is also very length but the reason why it get interesting at the end is because the writer picks the story up with a lot of short sentences that keeps us the reader in suspense and it makes it faster to read through the short sentences and also to understand them. In here the narrators point of view was that of a participant narrator because the writer wants us to see the story from the main characters point of view which is the reason why we could read about what she was thinking and the various ways she saw and looked at the yellow wallpaper in her room. Also when the narrator is a participant narrator the story is always written in the first person. It affects point of view affects the whole story because if the story is seen from another characters point of vie for example John the story will be entirely different because he is not the one hallucinating over a wall paper and he cannot read the main

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characters mind.

Both stories have a lot of differences because they are written by two entirely different authors who write about very different topics and they are similar in very few ways. When the two stories are compared the major similarity between these two short stories is that the author of both stories are women and therefore they related the main character in their story to themselves which is the reason why the main characters in both

stories are also women. Also another minor similarity is that the main character who the writer talked about were both in some sort of pain in the beginning of both stories. In contrast to both essays "The Yellow Wallpaper" was written in the first person while "The Storm of an Hour" was written in the third person and the narrator of this story is an omniscience or non participant narrator while the narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper" is a participant narrator. Also Kate Chopin's story was short and precise while Charlotte Perkins Gilman's story was a lot more longer and indirect in the sense that the author dragged the main point and placed toward the ending.

In conclusion both of the stories were similar in there own way and different also. Another thing that I consider as a similarity between both stories is that they both have ambiguous means, and can be translated in a million ways depending on the person that reads it because everyone will have a different interpretation for the meaning of each story. Also another contrast will be the authors inspiration to write each story because they were inspired by two totally different things which is one of the reasons why the stories are entirely different.

This is the complete article, containing 924 words (approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page).

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