An analysis and comparison of two short story openings

sentences describing his appearance, “inky fingers” and “his manner cynical”. This makes us think of a dirty man who is unclean and is not a very nice person. In contrast to these descriptions, in the setting the air is described as “fresh and glittering” and the sky is healthy. We get the impression that Brighton is a nice place to be; clean and peaceful and Hale doesn’t fit in there. The author of Uncle Ernest also uses a lot of description at the beginning of his story, but in a very different way. Everything we find out about the place and person is unpleasant. The effect of this is that the character blends in with the background and no one really notices him. This is completely opposite to Hale in Brighton and the way he stands out like a sore thumb. The character’s clothes are “dirty”, a shave was badly needed, and “he hadn’t washed” either. The setting mirrors this as he walks out of a public lavatory, a place generally seen as dirty and unpleasant, the gutters are “unswept” and there is rubbish all over the floor. This gives me the impression that Uncle Ernest isn’t very important where he lives as he fits in with everything else. The description in this story also has the effect on the audience that we are getting to know him more personally as we find out so much. Hale though, on the other hand, is to the audience, a mysterious man because we never find out what he looks like and he seems a bit suspicious, like “inky fingers” suggests. It could mean that he is a criminal because they have fingerprints taken or it could be something to do with his job, for example he could work with newspapers, we don’t know. This leaves the reader wondering, whereas any questions the reader has about Uncle Ernest’s’ appearance are answered in the detailed descriptions of him. Another technique used to help explain the stories is sentence structures. The styles are quite similar in both the stories. Graham Greene in Brighton Rock uses long sentences broken up with punctuation such as commas and colons. This has the effect that the story and action is going to move quite slowly. This effect is the same in Uncle Ernest as it also has long sentences split up with commas. A technique that differs greatly in the stories is the way the authors keep the audience interested. I think that Greene does this well, as he uses unanswered questions to make us want to read on and discover the answers and he also uses careful vocabulary to build up the readers expectations of excitement or danger; the word “murder” in the first sentence has this effect. Uncle Ernest though, to me has little excitement because we find out all of the important details about the main character within the first paragraph. We know his appearance, his name and even his job so no suspense or tension is built up in the story. “Ernest Brown the upholsterer” basically says it all about him already. In conclusion, I mostly enjoyed the opening of Brighton Rock by Graham Greene because I was kept interested throughout and I wanted to read the rest of the story to find out what happens to Hale and if he really gets murdered. I also want to get to know the character better because I feel I know nothing about him. The author writes the story well because the techniques he uses help to build the suspense. I did not really enjoy Uncle Ernest and I wasn’t inspired to read on because there was little action and I already knew lots about the main character.