Gryphon And Snow Comparison Essay

The two stories of my choice are ‘Snow,’ by Julia Alvarez and ‘Gryphon,’ by Charles Baxter. What intrigued me about these two stories are the similarities of how they both take place in classrooms; both stories are dealing with elementary school kids and in both stories, a kid was frightened by what they saw based on what the teacher told them. The little girl in Snow was frightened when, for the first time, she saw snowfall and because of the teacher’s description of fallout from a nuclear explosion, she thought that nuclear fallout was what she was seeing. In the short story, Gryphon, the little boy was frightened when the teacher told him that the tarot card he pulled that symbolized death, meant that he would die soon.
Another similarity I noticed were the timeframes that the two stories took place. The short story Gryphon took place around the mid to late
He described one girl as a bad person with an evil giggle and one of the boys as a “faultless brown-noser” (Lit. Kirszner & Mandell pg. 138). When it came to the main character, the substitute teacher, she was only described as being from Mars.
As for the tone of the stories, I would term both stories as direct, friendly, caring, compassionate and courteous (Lit. Kirszner & Mandell pg. 205). The language of both stories were, in my opinion, considered to be concrete. The metaphors or symbols of the stories were easy to envision. While reading the stories, I could actually picture myself in the classrooms with the students and being nine years old again in the fourth-grade, seeing what they saw and feeling how they felt about their teachers. They were stories that I could easily comprehend and identify with.
I’m a novice at this, so I couldn’t really find much contrast between the language, style and tone except that Gryphon had a bit more humor in it than Snow. So I would suppose that Baxter is a more humorous writer than