Fiction compare 2 stories - Essay Example

In the story The Land of Sad Oranges, the narrator’s character is a round character. While the narrator begins the story as a child, by the end of the story, the narrator’s childhood has departed, never to come back again. The story is about a family that leaves Palestine to Lebanon. When the journey starts, the narrator thinks that “we were just like anybody who goes to spend the festival season every year in another city” (Kanfani 137). But as they travel, the destruction of the family follows along with its occupation to Lebanon.

Eventually, the family makes its way to a refugee camp in a lorry with all its belongings. As the family of the narrator bundles up in a lorry, the land of the family is left behind forever. The defeated Arab armies crush any hope of the family that still lingers. The family notices the harsh reality of permanent exile from Palestine staring in its face. The narrator’s father decides to grab hold of the matters and out of anger, perplexity, and emotional outburst attempts to kill his own children as well as himself which however, does not happen eventually.

While the story ends in failure and defeat at this point, the narrator does mention how the whole situation impacted him and took his childhood away from him in these words, “As I left the house behind, I left my childhood behind too. I realized that our life had ceased to be pleasant, and it was no longer easy for us to live in peace” (Kanfani 141). What follows in the last few lines of the story is a depiction of an altogether change in attitude of the narrator that provides evidence of his lost childhood.

The narrator tells how he tried to behave in suitable ways understanding the complexity of the situation that had snatched his childhood from him; the narrator no more asked for food when he was hungry, remained silent while the father shared his difficulties, and simply smiled and obeyed when he was told to go to the mountain and not return till the midday. “You were huddled there, as far from your childhood as you were from the land of oranges” (Kanfani 141). In the story A Family Supper, the character Wantanabe is a round character.

In spite of being a man of honor and principle, Wantanabe could not sustain the grief of having his firm collapse and thus took not just his own life but also the life of his whole family including his wife and two daughters. As a man of principle, Wantanabe should have understood that the collapse of his firm was a natural incident and had nothing to do with his family. As the narrator’s father tells him, “After the firm’s collapse, Wantanabe killed himself. He didn’t wish to live with disgrace” (Ishiguro).

This suggests that for Wantanabe, taking the life of his whole family and committing suicide was a less disgraceful act or was not disgraceful at all as compared to having his firm collapsed. Had Wantanabe been a man of principle, he would never have displayed such cowardice and lack of courage that he did by taking the life of his family and committing suicide. Wantanabe’s act of killing his family and committing suicide makes the audience think that Wantanabe was never a man of principle in the first place.

However, the narrator’s father says that he had known and worked with Wantanabe as a partner for seventeen years, which is definitely a