Compare two different stories, John Steinbeck's 'Of Mice and Men' and Thomas Hardy's ' The Three Strangers'.

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The Three Strangers, Of Mice and Men

In this wide reading assignment I am going to compare two different stories, John Steinbeck’s ‘Of Mice and Men’ and Thomas Hardy’s ‘ The Three Strangers’.

Both stories are written in completely different countries. Hardy was writing in 1883 about rural Dorset in the 1820’s and because of the time period, Hardy’s writing goes into greater detail about everything in his story much more often than Steinbeck does in his ‘Of Mice and Men’. Steinbeck was writing about the life of workingmen in America one year after the Wall Street crash in the 1930’s. The story is based in California.

The initial differences in style of writing are quite easy to see.            Hardy writes with long, complex sentence structures, making long descriptions of the buildings, objects, people and weather. He uses complex, learned similes, “ the long inimical seasons, with their sleets, snows, rains and mists afford withdrawing space enough to isolate a Timon or a Nebuchadnezzar…”.

In contrast, Steinbeck is descriptive, but in a more economical, more to the point way of writing. He describes things within his story with a simple, direct approach, giving a clear visual image, “ A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas river drops in close to the hill-side bank and runs deep and green”.

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There are, however, some similarities between the two stories’ openings. Both open by describing very lonely, sparse locations. Hardy opens with “Fifty years ago such a lonely cottage stood on such a down…”, “In spite of it loneliness, however, the spot, by actual measurements, was not more than five miles from a Country town.” Steinbeck opens with a similar idea, “A few miles south of Soledad…”.

They both use the same device of a path to draw the reader into the story and they describe their opening scenes almost like you would imagine a film director to shoot his ...

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