As promised, I'm posting my last compare/contrast example. Better late than never.
I chose a story from Miranda July's anthology, No one belongs here more than you, called The Shared Patio. It's an eerie story about loving from a distance. The main character, the female neighbor, is in love with her male neighbor, Vincent, who is married to Helena, who the narrator feels is all wrong. The author (July) and narrator (whatever her name is) try to expose the fallacy of their marriage, cleverly using a basic compare/contrast structure to highlight similarities, differences, and, overall to tell the story.
Here's a link to the full story:
As I mentioned in class, I spent last week in a writing whirlwind—analyzing my own and obsessing about others, leading me back to Miranda July, which I have not picked up since last summer when I bought it. In fact, The Shared Patio is probably the only story in the book that I've actually read from start to finish. Of all the examples of compare/contrast examples I found, this story fit best what I was looking for in that it doesn't just "utilize" compare/contrast—the story itself is a big compare/contrast, with the success of the plot based on its delivery and execution.
What's additionally interesting about her use of compare/contrast in light of two strangers loving each other is that, as the reader, you can tell when the comparison, or even the contrast, feels forced or stretched. July forces the reader to critically look at the narrator and think: "What a crazy bitch this person is. How pathetic." Yet, there is somethinng whimsical and childlike about the narrator's love that we sense through the "long shot" parallels, which helps us not completely hate the narrator, perhaps.
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Examples of Compare/Contrast:
"He is my neighborhood. He is of Korean descent." - p.1
"Vincent has a wife named Helena. She is Greek with blond hair. It's dyed." - p. 2
"One reason Helena and I would never be close friends is that I am about half as tall as she. People tend to stick with their own size because it's easier on the neck." - p. 2
"He is the art director of a magazine called Punt. This is an unusual coindence because I am the floor manager of a printer and we sometimes print magazines. We don't print Punt, but we print a magazine with a similar name, Positive. It's actually more like a newsletter." - p. 4
"Because we are in the same business, he didn't have to explain that "typo" is short for typographical error." If Helena had come out, we would have had to stop using our industry lingo so that she could understand us, but she didn't come out because she is still at work. She's a physician's assistant, which may or may not be the same thing as a nurse." - p. 5
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There are more, but I'm not getting into tricky copyright bullshit. Click the link above to find my examples and read more.
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I see you bubbling all over the place -- you're yeasty, and I think it's grand!
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