A comparison of plot and its effect in "Antigone" by Anouilh, and "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" by Solzhenitsyn.

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World Literature 1:

A comparison of plot and its effect in "Antigone" by Anouilh, and "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" by Solzhenitsyn.

Candidate Name: Irkab Demha

Candidate Number: 000885 005

Naseem International School

Total Word Count: 1,495


Plot is the essential arrangement of story elements and events to create significance and extend the meaning of a story. The plot draws the reader into the protagonist's life and helps the reader understand the choices that the characters make. Writers vary plot structure depending on the needs of the story. In Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Anouilh'sAntigone, the plots have similar aspects like time scope and dissimilar aspects like pace. Each author deliberately structures his plot to create a desired effect.

A similarity between the two texts is that the events of each take place during the span of one day. The play of Antigone starts in the early morning when Antigone returns from her midnight walk. It ends after a series of long events towards the end of the day as Creon states with relief, "It's been a hard day. It must be good to sleep." (Anouilh 60). Similarly One Day begins in the early morning when Shukhov wakes up at the banging of the reveille to get ready for work parade, and ends at "lights-out". Since both plots span the events of one day, the texts have no chapters or acts, and this makes their respective plots continuous and flowing - appropriate for the depiction of the events of just one day. Furthermore, both plots are chronological, intending to show the unraveling of events.

One Day's slow pace can be rather boring for the reader at times. In contrast to this, Antigone's fast-paced tragedy immerses the reader into the heat ofthe action and tightly grabs one's attention. Nevertheless, the humor of One Day compensates for its dull and slow plot. Solzhenitsyn incorporates a lot of humor along with coarse language in the novel to freshen up the reader's attention and sarcastically depict the harsh life of convicts, as in: "Any herdsman can count better than those lay-abouts [the guards]" (Solzhenitsyn 142).

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However, the pace of the texts differs. One Day's plot is long and slow, because it is a description of all the happenings in one ofthe many tedious, tiring days in Shukhov's life, "a zek's [convict] day is a long one" (Solzhenitsyn 37). On the other hand, Antigone's plot is fast-paced, jumping to successive events, because it displays the inevitability of tragedy, as the chorus states in its famous interruption halfway through the play, "So. Now the spring is wound. The tale will unfold all of itself[ ... ] It does itself. Like clockwork set going since the beginning of ...

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