It is very interesting how two stories can talk about similar ideas and aspects, especially the ones written by Kate Chopin "The Story of an hour" and Grace Paley "Samuel", since they were written in two completely distinct periods and locations. Both short stories deal with the loss of someone special and how one may or may not love a person as much as they proclaim to, including that these stories have completely different time settings.
             The main similar idea in the stories characters Mrs. Louise Mallard in "the Story of an Hour" and the mother of Samuel in "Samuel" is that each individual loses someone which is "one of a kind" and very special to them. Mrs. Mallard for instance "loses" her husband in a train accident, she does miss him fondly, or she wouldn't have run upstairs and lock herself in her room, sit in her chair and look outside the window. She does feel a certain freedom attached to this loss, which no one knows about when she repeatedly says "Free, free, free!"(10). Samuel's mom, on the other hand, does not feel liberty or anything of the sort. She misses her son more than anything else and realizes that she will never have another son like him ever again even when she does have more children in the future, "Oh, oh, she hopelessly cried. She did not know how she could ever find another boy like that one."(12) The authors give a lot of detail on the way one misses her husband and the other misses her son. Both families related which makes the "getting over" process much harder than if it were a loss of a distant relative or an acquaintance.
             The time when the two stories were written is very far apart; therefore a different kind of reading should be done for "Samuel" as there should be for "The Story of an Hour". Since "Samuel" was written in 1968, we have to remember that people had star...