Narrative Comparisons
Junior Language and Composition
In each passage we will analyze and compare images, word choice, descriptive technique,
tone, and sentence structure.
From Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
Early morning is a time of magic in Cannery Row. In the gray time after the light has come and
before the sun has risen, the Row seems to hang suspended out of time in a silvery light. The
street lights go out, and the weeds are a brilliant green. The corrugated iron of the canneries
glows with the pearly lucence of platinum or old pewter. No automobiles are running then. The
street is silent of progress and business. And the rush and drag of the waves can be heard as they
splash in among the piles of the canneries. It is a time of great peace, a deserted time, a little era
of rest. Cats drip over the fences and slither like syrup over the ground to look for fish heads.
Silent early morning dogs parade majestically picking and choosing judiciously whereon to pee.
The sea gulls come flapping in to sit on the cannery roofs to await the day of refuse. They sit on
the roof peaks shoulder to shoulder. From the rocks near the Hopkins Marine Station comes the
barking of sea lions like the baying of hounds. The air is cool and fresh. […] It is the hour of the
pearl—the interval between day and night when time stops and examines itself.
From Empire Falls by Richard Russo
The Empire Grill was long and low-slung, with windows that ran its entire length, and since the
building next door, a Rexall drugstore, had been condemned and razed, it was now possible to sit
at the lunch counter and see straight down Empire Avenue all the way to the old textile mill and
its adjacent shirt factory. Both had been abandoned now for the better part of two decades,
through their dark, looming shapes at the foot of the avenue’s gentle incline continued to draw
the eye. Of course, nothing prevented a person from looking up Empire Avenue in the other
direction, but Miles Roby, the proprietor of the restaurant—and its eventual owner, he hoped—
had long noted his customers rarely did.
From “Enclosed, Encyclopedic, Endured: The Mall of America” by David Guterson
On Sunday, I wandered the hallways of the pleasure dome with the sensation that I had entered
an M. C. Escher drawing—there was no such thing as up or down, and the escalators all ran
backward. A 1993 Ford Probe GT was displayed as if popping out of a giant packing box; a fullsize home, complete with artificial lawn had been built in the mall’s rotunda. At the Michael
Ricker Pewter Gallery, I came across a miniature tableau of a pewter dog peeing on a pewter
man’s leg; at Hologram Land, I pondered 3-D hallucinations of the Medusa and Marilyn
Monroe. I passed a kiosk called the Sportsman’s Wife; I stood beside a life-size stature of the
Hamm’s Bear, carved out of pine and available for $1,395 at a store called Minnesot-ah! For a
while, I sat in front of Glamour Shots and watched while women were groomed and brushed for
photo sessions yielding high-fashion self-portraits at $34.95 each. There was no stopping, no
slowing down. I passed Mug Me, Queen for a Day, and Barnyard Buddies, and stood in the
Brookstone store examining a gopher “eliminator” for $40 and a “no-stoop” shoehorn for
$10.
From “A Hole in the Wall: A Reflection on the Aftermath of the World Trade Center” by Andrea
Barrett
In silent ranks, we watch the sun set over the smoking hole. The first night the cloud of smoke
blew east, over Brooklyn Heights, and we could hardly smell it. But the wind has shifted since
then, and as the sun sets, the smoke drapes Manhattan like a scarf and slides across the water into
our nostrils. It rains on Thursday night, after bolts of lightning first strike so close by that sparks
fly and our next-door neighbor’s television and amplifier are fried: a steady, unrelenting rain
pushed toward us by a strong wind blowing up the river. Before I think to close the front
windows (which face the bridge, and used to face the towers), the rain pours through the screens,
all over the sill and down the wall to the floor. I wipe up what I can. The next morning, I head
for the sill with a rag. Now the entire sill is dark gray, six linear feet of grime. What I dab
comes up like ash and as I back away, the rag still in my hand, I realize that’s what it is: ash of
buildings, ash of planes. Ash of people. Everything in the apartment is gritty, I now see. Table,
floor, pillows, sheets.
From “Once More to the Lake” by E. B. White
Summertime, oh summertime, pattern of life indelible, the fade-proof lake, the woods
unshatterable, the pasture with sweetfern and the juniper forever and ever, summer without end;
this was the background, and the life along the shore was the design, the cottagers with their
innocent and tranquil design, their tiny docks with the flagpole and the American flag floating
against the white clouds in the blue sky, the little paths over the roots of the trees leading from
camp to camp and the paths leading back to the outhouses and the can of lime for sprinkling, and
at the souvenir counters at the store the miniature birch-bark canoes and the post cards that
showed things looking a little better than they looked.