The two stories being compared in this paper are “I’m a Fool” by Sherwood Anderson and “The Lesson” by Toni Cade Bambara. “I’m a Fool” was first published in 1922 and “The Lesson” was first published in 1972. This paper will compare the two styles of the stories.
In the first story, “I’m a Fool,” Anderson uses simple words to communicate with the reader. He uses older language that implies the story was written some time in the early 1900’s. He uses language and words such as swipe, which is a slang term for one who rubs down horses. Most of the sentences are very lengthy and somewhat confusing. The reason the sentences are so long is because the author uses compound sentences with several conjunctions. Each conjunction makes the sentence that much longer. Anderson chose to use medium sized paragraphs that are full of narrative writing. The whole story is basically all narrative style writing. The author uses very little dialogue and even less descriptive writing. In this story, Anderson uses an implicit theme; he doesn’t make the theme really obvious and is somewhat hard to understand.
Overall, I didn’t enjoy reading this story very much. All the narrative style writing and the lengthy sentences made for a boring, slow story.
In the second story. “The Lesson,” the author also uses simple words and language. But, in this story, the author uses words and phrases that conform more to the accents of the characters. Phrases like, “Parents silly to buy something like that just to get all broke up,” say Rosie Giraffe. Bambara also uses profound words to create the characters’ true language and emotion. In addition, the author uses apostrophes in words when they would regularly be written out as two separate words. Such words as “father’d” and “who’d.”
This makes the character seem more himself. Bambara uses simple, short to medium sentences that are to the point. There are no long drawn out compound sentences that leave the reader confused. Along with the short sentences come the medium paragraphs. The author uses a few longer paragraphs to help explain things and not leave you wondering. Bamdara uses a pretty equal ratio of narrative to dialogue style writing. He uses a small amount of descriptive and a very little amount of exposition writing. As far as the theme goes for this story, it almost has an explicit theme but never really has enough information to call it one. Instead, it is more of an easy to understand implicit theme.
In closing, this story was much easier to understand than the previous one. I enjoyed reading this story because it is easy to understand and grasp.
The styles in which these two stories were written gives a great example of how big a difference two different authors can write. Each story used similar diction, sentence length and structure and paragraph length. Not to mention that both stories were written in the first person format. Although the two stories had similar characteristics, they were completely different in the way they were read, understood, and interrupted. The main difference I found to be most crucial was the fact that “the Lesson” used more dialogue, which enabled me to more understand the characters’ emotions and actions.
