The Begining And End Of Life

A tale about death or a short story about pride? Which one would you rather read? Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm wrote the tale “Godfather Death”. A tale is a narrative that relates the details of some real or imaginary events. However, “A&P” by John Updike is a short story. A short story is a piece of prose fiction usually under 10,000 words. “Godfather Death” and “A&P” are both exciting and intriguing to read, but each one has very different fictive elements to them.

The Grimm Brothers and John Updike use very different methods of telling their stories. “She came down a little hard on her heels, as if she didn’t walk in her bare feet that much, putting down her heels and then letting the weight move along to her toes as if she was testing the floor with every step” (17). Updike tells his story in a very descriptive way, while still obtaining the feeling of boredom that Sammy, the main character, has at his job. “The doctor immediately dropped to the ground and fell into the hands of death” (12). The Grimm Brothers use a more blunt way of telling their story, by going straight into what happens, and giving less description of the events. In “A&P” you get a sense of how the character feels, whereas in “Godfather Death” you are just reading the facts of what happens in the tale, with no sense of how the character feels. As a result, you get different moods from the stories just by the different methods the author uses to tell their story.

“Godfather death” has a very dark scary setting, while “A&P” takes place in a quiet, boring, grocery store. Most of “Godfather Death” is set at the sight of someone dying, but at the end the characters are in an underground cavern. “He led him to an underground cavern. There the doctor saw thousands and thousands of candles burning in endless rows. Some were tall, others medium-sized, and others quite small” (12). The setting in “Godfather Death” makes the story come together. It gives a better understanding of the whole story, since the story is based on death. The setting of “A&P”, is a silent undisturbed grocery store, which is then interrupted by three girls in their bathing suits. “The store’s pretty empty, it being Thursday afternoon, so there was nothing much to do except lean on the register and wait for the girls to show up again” (19). The store is boring and quiet and nothing new ever happen to it. Once the girls get into the store they not only bring excitement to the store, but even to the cashiers. The setting is what makes the stories so different form one another. There are many different settings in the tale, but in the short story there is only one.

The Plot of the two stories are similar to each other in the sense that the stories both have men who