Whitney gathright

Whitney Gathright Feb. 6th, 2013 Dr. James Shade English 1020 Analyses of two fictional stories Tiger Mending and A & P both are very interesting fictional stories. I will discuss the authors and also analyze them both. The narrators both have significant roles in the stories. I will also discuss the tone, point of views, and imagery taken place in both stories. Both titles of the stories are significant and will be explained in detail of why and how. In the fictional story Tiger Mending by Aimee Bender written in 2004. The author Aimee Bender who was born in the late 1960s attended the University of California and taught elementary in San Diego for 3 years. She currently lives in Los Angeles, LA and teaches creative writing at the University of Southern California. The story Tiger Mending is about two sisters who have lost both their parents to a surgeon. One sister is blessed with skills to greatly concentrate on sewing by staring out of windows and the other sister who is a manager at Burger King, but quits because her sister is being offered a job across the country. The two arrive in Malaysia with the women who hires her and they take them to a place blind folded for privacy. When the girls get there they hear moaning and discover it is tigers and the skilled sister is being asked to sew their strips together. When the narrator finds out what is supposed to be happening she catches a flight back home. The narrator of Tiger Mending is the sister of the main character. The narrator works at Burger King on Fourth and is the manager, but soon quits to go with her sister on a trip to Malaysia. The story takes place first in the U. S. but soon moves to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in 2004. The tone of the story for both the narrator and her sister is elicited, but also weird in a way because the two sisters fly across the country to sew up some tiger’s strips that has gone missing. They are both excited that they can go out of the country together while her sister works. The story is written is first-person point of view. I don’t think there is any symbolism in this story particularly. The imagery in this story has to be the women bringing out the tigers and having the sister sew together their strips, which doesn’t make any sense because how would a tiger lose its strips and get them sewn back? The very skilled sister once was enrolled in med school to be a surgeon, but soon stop attending because she decided that is not what she wants to do. She doesn’t want to do it anymore, because her parents both died because of a surgeon, so by this happening it motivated her to stop going to med school and pick up something else she was skilled in. The title is very significant in this story, because mending the Tiger’s strips back together is what the sister is asked to do for the women. The next fictional story is A & P by John Updike which was written in the early 1960s. The author John Updike was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania on 1932 and graduated from Harvard University then went on to Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Arts in Oxford. Updike has a job at The New Yorker which pursued his writing career. A & P is about the narrator working at a grocery store and spots three girls who are walking around in the store with bathing suits on, he watches their every move. One of the girls was chubby, another was tall with frizzy black hair and the last one was beautiful in his eyes so he calls her Queen. The girls were walking around the store for quite a while looking for one thing and the manager comes in and doesn’t like the clothes they have on and tells them not to come back like that, the narrator doesn’t like that so he quits after he checks the girls out, but couldn’t find them after that. The narrator of this story is the main character who’s name is Sammy. The tone of the story is humorous in certain parts when he follows the girls around the store and thinks every little thing Queen does is adorable, but quickly turns dark when the manager walks in and tells the girls about wearing bathing suites in the store and Sammy quits his job after the incident even though his family are good friends with his boss. The story is told in first-person point of view from Sammy. I think that Sammy’s point of view changes over the course of the story is more important than his reliability as a narrator. At the beginning of the story he’s simply whining and complaining about the conformity and dullness of his community. Queenie and the other two girls show him a simple way of mocking this conformity. By wearing their bathing suits into the store, they mix things up a little. Sammy follows suit by removing his A&P bow tie and apron when he quits, expressing solidarity with the girls and using his clothing, like them, as a form of activism. Over the course of the story, he goes from complaining about what he sees as a problem to actually doing something about it.   Sammy is described as an “ eyeing the three bikini-clad girls who walk into his supermarket where he is a checker. His reverie is interrupted, however, by a ” witch” whose ” feathers” Sammy has to smooth, ” which is thought of as negative. Stockese could be a symbol of what Sammy could grow up to be which is married with kids and tied down. Another Symbolism could be Lengel, the manager, who could be a symbol of those adults who, like the witches, could not care less about youthful ambition. The last symbolism is “ sheep” which Sammy refers to the two friends of Queen as. He calls them this because he thinks they flock behind her. A&P, the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, is a real grocery store (and liquor) chain, founded in New York City in 1859. Updike says that one day in 1961 he was, as usual, on the lookout for story ideas when he happened to drive past an A&P. He wondered why nobody had ever set a story in one.   The two stories A & P and Tiger Mending have a few similarities in common. One thing is that the narrators both didn’t really like their jobs and quit over a matter of time, the sister in “ Tiger Mending” has been looking for a reason to quit her job and as soon as her sister tells her she should, she does so. Sammy on the other hand, doesn’t quit until an incident occurs and he doesn’t like the way some customers are treated. Another similarity is that both the narrators are young, maybe in their pre-teens or young adults, Sammy is still worried about what his parents think after he quits and the sister in “ A&P” is living under her sister and her dreams. Both narrators also went with whatever they thought was right, because in “ Tiger Mending” the sister left her sister in Malaysia because she didn’t like the thought of actually mending tigers and in “ A&P” Sammy quits his job because he doesn’t like the way the girls are treated and embarrassed in the store by the manager. In conclusion, the two stories “ A&P” and “ Tiger Mending” have a few similarities but are different in many ways. The authors and their backgrounds of life were discussed, which played some part in the stories. The narrators in both stories also play an important role in the stories. An analyzes was done and also the tone, point of view, and imagery. Both of the titles have significant meanings in each story.