Paulina Salinas and Noboru Kuroda - Book Report/Review Example

Sometimes, however, writers can be similar in developing their characters. Yukio Mishima's novel, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea, and Ariel Dorfman's Death And The Maiden are two powerful and provocative stories that makes the audience contemplate on the meaning of being human with focus on the workings of the mind. These two stories evoke mixed feelings regarding the morality of an act and the application of justice achieve thru the portrayal of deeds committed and philosophical reasoning of its characters.

However, one will notice that there are similarities between Paulina Salas of Dorfman and Noburo Kuroda of Mishima's story. The interest of this aim of this paper is to analyze not only the perceived similarities but also the differences in the way Mishima and Dorfman introduces and develops the characters that I have just mentioned. To achieve this, I will first provide a background regarding the life of the writers followed by a summary of the two stories. I shall then proceed in delineating the similarities of the two characters followed by their differences and try to relate it with the similarity in the life experiences of the two authors.

In the end, I will provide a conclusion addressing the degree of similarity of the two writers in developing their characters. Yukio Mishima was a Japanese author and playwright who. Mishima's life is rather controversial because of his social and political inclinations. Besides from being a writer, Mishima was also engaged in homosexual activities, martial arts, bodybuilding and the fascist militarism of Japan's past. He founded a kind of private Bushido-based army which tried to inspire a national uprising by taking over a military complex.

When he failed to inspire the soldiers and was jeered at instead, he committed seppuku- an ancient tradition of ritual suicide undertaken by the Japanese to maintain their integrity and honor. (Scott-Stokes, 1995) Chilean playwright Ariel Dorfman worked in the administration of president Salvador Allende but was forced to exile following the Chilean military coup of General Pinochet's army in 1973. His works include Death and the Maiden, The Late Song of Manuel Sendero and My House is on Fire.

The unique story in the Death and the Maiden was the result of Dorfman's fascination of the process of the Rettig Commission, a commission established by the democratically elected president Patricio Aylwin to investigate the crimes of the dictatorship that had ended in death or the presumption of death. This setting was the necessary ingredient for his story about a stranger entering the life of a husband and wife and becoming kidnapped by the wife. (Ariel Dorfman Online, 2007)2.2 Synopsis of the StoriesIn the novel entitled The Sailor who fell from the Grace with the Sea, we come to know of the sailor Ryuji who meets and falls in love with a woman.

The woman's name was Fusako and was the mother of 13 year old Noburo Koruda. The boy, which is the focus of our discussion, is depicted to be a member