Compare and Contrast, the Welcome Table and Country Lovers
Week Three Assignment: Compare and Contrast
Jacqueline Stephens
ENG 125 Introduction to Literature
Instructor Annemarie Hamlin
September 20, 2012
Week Three Assignment: Compare and Contrast I have chosen to compare and contrast the literary works, “Country Lovers” by Nadine Gordimer and “The Welcome Table” by Alice Walker, the theme being race / ethnicity. I want to explore the differences in how each of the black women portrayed their selves and how the narrator made me feel when reading each of the stories. Both stories are told in the third-person omniscient point of view, you can tell because the narrator lets you know how all of the characters feel in the story. For example, in “The Welcome Table”:
The old woman stood with eyes uplifted in her Sunday–go–to–meeting clothes: high shoes polished about the tops and toes, a long rusty dress adorned with an old corsage, long withered, and the remnants of an elegant silk scarf as head rag stained with grease from the many oily pigtails underneath. Perhaps she had known suffering. There was a dazed and sleepy look in her aged blue–brown eyes. But for those who searched hastily for "reasons" in that old tight face, shut now like an ancient door, there was nothing to be read. And so they gazed nakedly upon their own fear transferred; a fear of the black and the old, a terror of the unknown as well as of the deeply known. Some of those who saw her there on the church steps spoke words about her that were hardly fit to be heard, others held their pious peace; and some felt vague stirrings of pity, small and persistent and hazy, as if she were an old collie turned out to die (section 3.1).
And then in “Country Lovers”:
For the first time since he was a small boy he came right into the kraal. It was eleven o 'clock in the morning. The men were at work in the lands. He looked about him, urgently; the women turned away, each not wanting to be the one approached to point out where Thebedi lived. Thebedi
Jacqueline Stephens
ENG 125 Introduction to Literature
Instructor Annemarie Hamlin
September 20, 2012
Week Three Assignment: Compare and Contrast I have chosen to compare and contrast the literary works, “Country Lovers” by Nadine Gordimer and “The Welcome Table” by Alice Walker, the theme being race / ethnicity. I want to explore the differences in how each of the black women portrayed their selves and how the narrator made me feel when reading each of the stories. Both stories are told in the third-person omniscient point of view, you can tell because the narrator lets you know how all of the characters feel in the story. For example, in “The Welcome Table”:
The old woman stood with eyes uplifted in her Sunday–go–to–meeting clothes: high shoes polished about the tops and toes, a long rusty dress adorned with an old corsage, long withered, and the remnants of an elegant silk scarf as head rag stained with grease from the many oily pigtails underneath. Perhaps she had known suffering. There was a dazed and sleepy look in her aged blue–brown eyes. But for those who searched hastily for "reasons" in that old tight face, shut now like an ancient door, there was nothing to be read. And so they gazed nakedly upon their own fear transferred; a fear of the black and the old, a terror of the unknown as well as of the deeply known. Some of those who saw her there on the church steps spoke words about her that were hardly fit to be heard, others held their pious peace; and some felt vague stirrings of pity, small and persistent and hazy, as if she were an old collie turned out to die (section 3.1).
And then in “Country Lovers”:
For the first time since he was a small boy he came right into the kraal. It was eleven o 'clock in the morning. The men were at work in the lands. He looked about him, urgently; the women turned away, each not wanting to be the one approached to point out where Thebedi lived. Thebedi
References: APA Formatting, retrieved from https://content.ashford.edu/books/AUWC.12.4 Clugston, R. W. (2010). Journey into literature. San Diego, California: Bridgepoint Education, Inc. Retrieved from https://content.ashford.edu/books