The Machine That Won The War Analysis

Today, I will compare and contrast three short stories; The Interlopers by Saki, The Story of an Hour by Chopin and The Machine That Won the War by Asimov. These three stories have many things in common, but they are also very different. The Interlopers is about two warring neighbors who get lost in their woods, and find themselves in a big predicament. The Story of an Hour is about a lady who finds out that her husband has died, and her reactions to the news. The Machine That Won the War is about three men after a war in the future and their arguments on who their victory is accredited to. We will look at:

The writing styles of the stories
The time periods of the stories
The characters of the stories.

So first we’ll talk about the stories’ writing styles. All of these stories are written in third person. To write in third person means that you are writing as if you are a fly on the wall. Examples of this are given from the beginning of the stories, “Knowing that Mrs. Mallard had heart trouble, great care was taken to break the news of her husband’s death.” The introductory sentence of The Story of an Hour, “The celebration had a long way to go and even in the silent depths of Multivac's underground chambers, it hung in the air.” the introductory sentence to The Machine That
The Story of an Hour is the oldest of all the stories, as it was placed in 1894. You can see some evidence of this in the words, “He had only taken the time to assure himself if it’s truth by a second telegram” and by the date next to the author’s name. The Interlopers and The Machine That Won the War seem to be written around the same time.

Last, but not least, we will look at the main characters of the stories. The characters are, Mrs. Mallard (The Story of an Hour), Lamar Swift, Max Jablonsky, and John Henderson (The Machine That Won the War) and Ulrich von Gradwitz and Georg Znaeym (The Interlopers). Mrs. Mallard