Comparison Of Lee And Anaya's Short Stories

Both Harper Lee and Rudolpho Anaya use similar writing styles to move along their plot lines and to transport the reader into the story. Two key elements that the writers use are time and speech. The way the books pass time is very interesting. They tend to spend entire chapters focusing in on a small portion of time, anywhere between a few hours or a week, and in this amount of time, something very significant happens. Then after the big moments are past, the book will devote a few sentences to summing up a very large amount of time, whether that be a few weeks, a season, or very commonly: the school year. The novels have their main characters focus on certain points in the future, and the time prior to those times tend to be only briefly touched upon. …show more content…
They breeze through most events that take place in the school year, and have most of their stories taking place in the freedom and warmth that comes with the season. Scout takes the time to describe her feelings towards summer, saying to the reader, “Summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screened porch in cots, or trying to sleep in the treehouse; summer was everything good to eat; it was a thousand colors in a parched landscape; but most of all, summer was Dill,”(p 44) and directly after she narrates about the joy summer brings her, it is followed with more time movement, skipping to the start of the season, “The authorities released us early the last day of school.”(p 45) Prior to these quotes, she had been speaking briefly of the “remainder of [her] schooldays”(p 43) that year, skipping over most individual events that happened throughout that