In The Birds the Hockens live in a house that is near to the sea. They live near the Trigs farm, where Nat works part time. You can see that they live near the sea and the farm from the line that says, “where the sea surrounded the farmland on either side.”
Both of these stories do not contain much description of the place that it is set in.
In The Sea-Raiders there are only a few characters that have names, the main character is called Mr. Fison and the other people who have names do not really need them as their names were not used often and I think it would not have made any difference if these other few people where nameless.
We can see that Mr. Fison is a brave man because when he first sees the sea creatures eating the dead person on the beach he try’s to stop them and scare them off they then come after him so he runs away for his own safety, but later on he and three other men go out in small wooden boats to try and recover the dead person body, what’s left of it.
We can tell that he is a very brave man from the line in the story that reads, “It says much for the modesty and courage of Mr. Fison.” This quote was taken from when Mr. Fison and the other men were fighting the sea creatures.
We can also see that he is brave because when he is fighting the creatures from the boat he helps the other men a lot when they were in trouble, not even thinking of his own safety. An example of when he helps someone else is “Help here!” cried the boatman, and Mr. Fison and the second workman rushed to help lug at the oar.
We can see that he is also a caring man because when he is fighting the creatures in the boat he sees another boat nearby, but instead of getting them to help him and the other men he tells them to go away because there is a child on the other boat.
In The Birds the main character is a man called Nat who works part time on a farm, he works part time because of a wartime disability. Nat is of a solitary disposition and likes to work alone, even though he has a wife and kids.
When the birds first attack Nat one night he was scared and thinks that the birds were scared and that’s why they did it, but when they keep attacking people and houses Nat knows that they are trying to injure and kill people on purpose. The first night they attacked him he thinks it was because of the weather, because it was a lot colder than normal that winter. You can see that Nat thinks this when he says, “It’s the weather, he said. It must be that; it’s the hard weather.”
After the birds first attacked him, Nat is careful of the birds and keeps himself and his family indoors all the time only going out to get supplies to keep them safe and alive while the birds are still around.
The birds that attack are all different species of normal land birds and there are also sea birds, such as gulls as well. The birds are in groups of their own kind and they behave differently. For example, some species attack the doors while others attack the windows of Nat’s home.
The other characters in this story are the Trig family. They don’t believe that the birds are a real threat and at one point in the story the farmer (Mr. Trig) go out shooting them and asks Nat if he would like to join him and also offers him a gun to use. Nat thinks that Trig is crazy and asks himself “What use is a gun against a sky of birds?”
Later on in the story the Trigs end up dead for not protecting themselves against the birds, this also proves that Nat was right about the birds posing a major threat all along.
Daphne du Maurier did not give any physical descriptions of any of the characters in this story. I think she did this because she wanted to let the reader’s imagination decide what the people would look like. I think that this makes the story better because you can decide yourself and the story is also made shorter without the descriptions of the characters.
The style of writing in The Sea Raiders is different in each section. In the first and last section it is written in a style called Reportage, this means that it is written in a style of writing that would normally be used in broadsheet newspapers and scientific magazines. The middle section, the section with the main story in it is written in a very descriptive way. Wells used a lot of very detailed description in the story, which can easily create a picture of what is happening in the readers mind. Wells also give the creatures in the story a Latin name of haploteuthis ferox which makes them seem more realistic.
The Sea Raiders is written in the 3rd person because if Mr. Fison was used to tell the story it would seem much more personnel and it would then be much less realistic It is told objectively.
In this story Wells does not develop any of the character other than Mr. Fison. If he developed other character as well the story would have been much longer.
The sentence structure in this story is much different than in The Birds. This story contains longer sentences with a more complicated vocabulary.
The Birds has a structure that is a lot different than that of The Sea Raiders. This story contains a lot more direct speech where as The Sea Raiders did not. The vocabulary used is also much easier to understand.
The Birds has an open ending. This means that there is no definite ending and the reading does not know if the Hockens live or die. I personally would rather it had a normal ending.
You can quite easily tell that the stories were written in different centuries, and that The Sea Raiders is the story that was written first because it seems more dated, because the style it was written in is not used in many stories that were written in the 20th century.
You can tell that The Birds was written in the mid-20th century because they have a radio, but it is called a wireless. They also seen to have no TV, phone, or any other forms of communication or sources of news that they can get without going out. The wireless seems to be their only source of what is going on elsewhere. The comment about the Russians was made because the story was written during the cold war.
In conclusion I prefer The Birds because it is much easier, because it uses a simpler vocabulary and it is set in almost modern times. I also like it more because it is based on something that could one day really happen and it also makes you think of what it would be like if birds really started to attack humans.
