Comparison
"Cider with Rosie" is an extract taken from an autobiography written by Laurie Lee. Lee recalls the day in his childhood when he first starts schooling in his village. The extract is set in the countryside of 1920's England, in the city of Cloustershire, where the author grew up. "Charles", a short story by Shirley Jackson, also talks about a boy, called Laurie, going to kindergarten for the first time. The setting is modern times in the United States of America. This can be determined through different words used for the same expressions in Britain and America or the difference in their spellings. For example, the British say "biscuits", while the Americans call them "cookies". In America the word "color" is spelled differently from the British's "colour" (with a "u"). Besides the differentiation in language usage, there are other techniques used in literatures that are distinguishable too. At the beginning of "Charles", Laurie is excited to go to school on the first day as he forgets to wave his mother goodbye when he sets off to school with an older girl next door. Then he comes back from school and slams the front door open, throws his cap onto the floor and shouts harshly, "Isn't anybody here?" He is no longer the innocent
The next day when Laurie returns from school, he says that Charles hit the teacher for making him color with red crayons instead of green. He seems to be very happy with Charles bad behavior. He also makes fun of his father, saying "Look up. Look down. Look at my thumb. Gee, you're dumb," and he laughs "insanely". For the rest of the first week of school, Charles is still behaving badly in school and is punished by the teacher all the time. Laurie tells his parents about Charles everyday on what he has done to get punishment. His mother blames Charles for all the bad grammar and rude expressions Laurie has been using, but her husband just feels its better for Laurie to meet people like Charles now than in the future. On Monday, Laurie is late for lunch and he tells his mother that Charles got detention for yelling in school and so everyone stayed there just to watch him. From Tuesday to Thursday Charles is bad. Then on Friday he stays after school again, and so does everyone who watches him. Surprisingly, Charles later becomes the teacher's good helper. Laurie sounds unhappy or "grimly" when he reports good news of Charles to his parents. However, the good news does not last long. On Friday, Charles returns to his normal rude self again. By this time, Laurie's parents are really anxious to meet Charles' mother at the next PTA meeting. At the meeting, however, Laurie's mother does not manage to find anyone who seems to know about Charles. So she decides to approach the kindergarten teacher directly. Only then she finds out that Charles does not exist at all as a real person in school. Charles is in fact Laurie. What Laurie (as Charles) has done shows that he's showing off to try to get attention from the people around him. To do this, he feels that being rude and bad is the easiest way of. The ending is in fact a surprise to most people, because the readers start off reading about 'Laurie's friend', Charles, and when they begin to capture the idea of 'bad Charles', Charles turns out to be Laurie himself. In school, Lee describes what he sees at his eye level. Being young, small in size, short when he attends the village school, so everything he sees is from people's waist-and-below, and everyone is humongous to him. "Old boots, ragged stockings, torn trousers and skirts, went skating and skidding around me.... Tall girls with frizzled hair
Some common words found in the essay are:
Cider Rosie, Charles Laurie, Loll You're, Laurie Lee, Laurie Lee's, Surprisingly Charles, Britain America, Laurie Charles, Lee Lee, Infants Laurie, foreign language, school charles, laurie lee, charles laurie, cider rosie, charles bad, speak foreign language, speak foreign, baked potato, language learning, stay home,
Approximate Word count = 1590
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)
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