Comparasion Essay

Within The House of the Spirits and The Story of Zahra, Isabel Allende and Hanan al-Shaykh establish setting through their use of point of view, narrative technique, and parallelism. Allende uses two different types of point of view to tell her story, first person and third person. They differ in the way she presents them because the first person point of view comes from Esteban Trueba, whose thoughts are directly from experiencing the story, whereas the third person point of view comes from an unknown source who has only read the story through journal entries. Al-Shaykh uses point of view differently because she shows multiple first person point of view. The change of point of view in literature, affects the way the reader can perceive the setting that the character is in. Allende and al-Shaykh use narrative technique to show that characters are all different in the way they describe a setting. The differences are seen by the reader through the feelings that the character experiences and through the specific diction that both authors use. Both authors also use parallelism to show that their characters can reflect the setting. This essay will compare the ways that both authors create setting through the above techniques.

Allende and al-Shaykh both use point of view in different ways to establish setting. Al-Shaykh creates the setting of Africa through three different first person points of view whereas Allende does this through her contrast of a first person point of view and a third person omniscient. With Zahra’s point of view, coming to Africa without ever living there before affects that setting because everything is new to her, so she makes assumptions, “…a narrow corridor, filled with TV sets, radios and records, stacked on shelves to the ceiling. When I saw these for the first time, I was afraid they might tumble on my head…” (al-Shaykh, 1986, p.20). The “narrow corridor” represents Zahra’s assumption about her uncle’s life because she feels trapped in...