COMPARE AND CONTRAST PATTERN: 52. Create comparisons (compare and contrast paper)

52. Create Comparisons (compare and contrast papers):

When analyzing an excerpt from a text, it is informative to make the connections between similar passages in the same text or in a companion text. While these rhetorical moves are required in a compare and contrast essay, they can and should occur in analysis of a single text. Formal critics believe that all parts of a text must serve an unified whole; it is the job of a good reader and writer to show how similar passages work together to form the whole that is the text’s meaning.

Below is an analysis paragraph of a single text paper on David Duncan’s The River Why and the comparison and contrast sentences are in bold:

As Gus slowly transitions from being a solipsist nonbeliever to a spiritual adult, he begins to take control of his life and believe in a God. The people and experiences that influence Gus as he continues his quest for spirituality and God play a large role in his life. Gus feels as though his parents don’t respect his feelings, and he becomes irritated by them. Gus rejects his father’s ‘Sum Total Theory’ which states that we are all borrowed energy units from one big source, as well as his mother’s atheistic views, because he believes that there is a better answer to his questions about a Divine Being. His little brother, Bill Bob, has a theory about the Garden World, which is a place you go when you die. In the Garden World you start out old and get younger, and then transform back into our world. After remembering Bill Bob’s Garden World, the haunting image of Anvil Abe, a dead fisherman who Gus hooks on his fly rod and makes a connection with himself, leaves Gus and he no longer fears death. Gus stops fishing all the time, meets his neighbors and makes friends. Gus soon becomes content with his life and feels as though he is at last in control. Gus confesses, “In the weeks that followed, my life began to feel to me more like a toy in the hands of Heaven and Earth than a tangle of a tissue and glands in the hands of an idiot named Gus.” (Duncan 200). At this point in time in the novel, Gus has rejected school, religion, and now, his parents. This comment about Heaven, Hell, and Will from Gus anticipates later moments in the novel. As Gus begins to sense God’s presence and feel secure in his life, Gus is sent spiritual leaders such as Titus, Nick, and Eddy. By finding spiritual meaning in his life, Gus evolves. Along the same lines Gus develops a reverence for the natural order of things and believes Titus, Nick, and Eddy are as essential to his evolving spirituality as the purity of earth, air, fire, and water are to the sustenance of the natural world. In the end, Gus’s spirituality evolves with his environmental conscience.

COMPARISON STARTERS:

(X AND Y ARE CHARACTERS OR AUTHORS):

-Similar to the way in which X ________________, Y ________________.

-As X concludes that ______________________, Y concludes that________________________.

-Along the same lines __________________________________________.

-Similarly, __________________________________________.

-In the same way that X ________________________, Y ___________________.

-Both X and Y believe that __________________________________.