Short Story Comparison Essay

The tone of A Reasonable Sum is clear throughout the entire story. The main character is in his first day of high school, and all of the negative things just pile up on him. It’s obvious that the tone of the story is very negative, specifically, towards high school.

Jerry Spinelli also made the tone of School Spirit very unmistakable. The main character, Arnold, is offered four wishes, three for the benefit of his school, and one for himself. All four wishes are granted and work out extremely well for him. However, he’s not satisfied. He realizes that the wishes weren’t how things were supposed to be in reality, so he terminates his wishes. He concludes that even though things aren’t perfect, he can still take pride in the way things are.

After the Wedding provides a tone so obvious that you can’t argue it if you’ve read the story. The main conflict of the st

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Although they’re not as common as in School Spirit, they are used more often than in A Reasonable Sum. Like A Reasonable Sum, the story is set in a modern day high school.

Ouida Sebestyen makes the point-of-view of After the Wedding very unmistakable. It’s the first day of high school for the main character, which just adds to the story. ” That sentence shows that the story is being told by somebody outside of the action. The narrator doesn’t refer to any other character’s thoughts throughout the story, so it’s very clear that the point-of-view of this story is third-person limited. The narrator refers to the characters by their names or pronouns, such as ‘he’ and ‘she. ”

School Spirit contains much more figurative language than the other two stories. It’s as if the narrator wrote the story about himself. It uses the word ‘I’ to refer to the main character throughout the entire story. “Well, you stayed up all night, but today came anyway. Some of these elements aren’t as definitive in some stories as they are in others and vise versa, but it is very important to be able to identify these elements. An example of a metaphor used in the story is, “’Is that how you saw me – a roller coaster giving free rides?’”

The setting of A Reasonable Sum is very unmistakable.

Like the other two stories, After the Wedding contains a decent amount of metaphors.

Common topics in this essay:
Reasonable Sum, School Spirit, Ouida Sebestyen, Jerry Spinelli, Rusty Jolene, reasonable sum, Gordon Korman, story told, school spirit, main character, figurative language, entire story, , throughout entire, jerry spinelli, throughout entire story, day school, story told outside, tone point-of-view figurative, told outside action, story moves, outside action narrator,

Approximate Word count = 921
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)

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