Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Compare and Contrast Essay

    Folklore is the traditional lore or legends of a people. The stories are often false or greatly exaggerated. Different cultures have differences in their stories as well as similarities. Take these three stories, for instance. "Bloody Knife", from Nova Scotia; "Pink", from Florida; and "Axe Murder Hollow", from New Jersey all have similarities, but they all have differences as well.
    First off, all three of the stories have serious tones, but the tones all differ slightly. None of the tones are light-hearted: every story is serious. "Bloody Knife" has a very sinister, mysterious tone. When the two men fight in a bloody battle, the tone is sinister. When the knife mysteriously avoids being grabbed, the tone turns to mysterious. "Pink" has a vengeful tone when the man strangles his wife in revenge for her angering him. "Axe Murder Hollow"'s tone is downright scary. The ghost axeman comes out of nowhere and mutilates first the man and then the woman.
    Next, somebody is murdered in every one of the stories. Each one of their deaths also resulted from an emotional flare that sparked a physical encounterment. The reasons for their death are different, though, and they were all killed in a different way.  In "Bloody Knife", one man is wounded and bleeds out in a knife fight with another man. The two men were enemies, and the fight resulted from the two men having a verbal argument. In "Pink", a man chokes his wife to death in a fit of rage after words were exchanged between the two of them. The man did not appreciate the fact that his wife spent more time with their male gardener than she did with him. In "Axe Murder Hollow",  two people were chopped up by a ghost with an axe because he was jealous of their love.
    Finally, many literary elements in the stories are the same. For instance, all three stories have good diction and sentence structure. all stories all have a protagonist and antagonist. In "Pink", the man is the protagonist and his wife is the antagonist. In "Axe Murder Hollow", the man and woman are the protagonists, and the ghost is the antagonist. In "Bloody Knife", both men are protagonists and antagonists, as both men are fighting each other to stay alive.
    All folklore has it's own style. Each culture will slight differences in their structure or style. They will also have similarities, too, such as supernatural happenings or exaggeration.

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