53. Create contrasts (compare and contrast paper)

53.Create Contrasts (compare and contrast papers):

As with comparison starters, contrasting starters are used in each compare and contrast essay, but they can also add a more nuanced argument to your claims in a single text analysis. Contrasting starters allow your analysis to go against a strain of thought or anticipate future action in a text that contradicts the immediate conclusion you are making.

Below are two analysis paragraphs on the negative psychological effects of war upon Nick Adams in Our Time and Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five. The comparison and contrasting sentences are in bold:

The novel In Our Time displays many examples of unnecessary cruelty towards innocent people and animals. During the war Nick witnesses many horrifying deaths. In one of these situations a helpless minister is shot to death; describing this situation Hemingway writes:

They shot the six cabinet ministers at half-past six

in the morning against the wall of a hospital.

All of the shutters of the hospital were nailed shut. One of

the ministers was sick with typhoid. Two soldiers carried

him downstairs and out into the rain. They tried to

hold him up against the wall but he sat down in a puddle of

water... finally the officer told the soldiers it was no

good trying to make him stand up. When they fired the first

volley he was sitting down in the water with his

head on his knees.

(Hemingway 52)

At this point in the novel, the reader has seen Nick help his father perform a c-section on a Native woman, break up with his girlfriend, and lose his first fight. He is now a soldier in W.W.I. These ministers are put to death for a reason which isn’t told. In the above excerpt, the narrator emphasizes that the religious ministers or high ranking soldiers are being shot outside of a hospital that has its shutters are “nailed shut.” The closed windows suggest that there is no help for them and a place of healing and altruism would rather not see outside. Even though the ministers may be guilty of some unknown crime, it is still inhumane to kill someone who doesn’t even have the strength to stand. Although this analysis is primarily concerned with an isolated firing squad, it also develops the larger concept of the inhumanity of soldiers during war. This debilitating effect of violence in and out of war is present all throughout the novel.

Similar to the way in which Nick was repeatedly reminded of the unwarranted cruelty of war, this unjustified brutality continues in W.W.II and finds expression in the novel Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse - Five. All throughout the war, Vonnegut’s protagonist Billy experiences difficult and violent situations. He-like Vonnegut himself- is captured and made a prisoner of war in Dresden. Billy and other Americans are kept in a slaughterhouse in the city of Dresden, Germany. In an attack on Dresden U.S. bombers kill 135,000 people, 63,621 more people than were killed from the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Describing a disturbing situation which takes place after being bombed by his own army, Vonnegut states:

American fighter planes came in under the smoke to see if anything was moving. They saw Billy and the rest moving down there. The planes sprayed them

with machine-gun bullets, but the bullets missed. Then

they saw some other people moving down by the riverside

and they shot at them. They hit some of them. So it goes.

The idea was to hasten the end of the war.

(Vonnegut 180)

It is important to remember that Billy has fought nobly in the war and has been captured by the Germans at this point in the novel. This excerpt reveals that after the bombing Billy and other survivors are walking in the barren wasteland which was once the beautiful city of Dresden. Everything they see is dead, and they see no other survivors beside themselves. The fact that American planes came in and shot at the few living people they could find after they had already bombed the city is merciless and cruel. Both Billy and Nick observe unjustifiable cruelty towards humans during the war. As Nick concludes that humans have no limit to their cruelty, Billy concludes that his own Army was willing to kill American prisoners-of-war in order to “hasten the end of the war.” The sarcastic tone of that last line of the passage captures Vonnegut’s anger. Unlike Billy, Nick doesn’t have a firsthand encounter with this violence. Whereas Nick witnesses the handicapped minister being shot, Billy’s own country tries to kill him. In the end, both Billy and Nick are affected by post traumatic stress syndrome (P.T.S.D.). Even though neither Hemingway nor Vonnegut had access to this clinical term, they both knew and wrote powerfully about its effects. By developing the significance of psychological stress on soldiers at war, both novels reveal how important it is understand the psychological cost of war.

CONTRASTING STARTERS:

(X AND Y ARE CHARACTERS OR AUTHORS)

-Despite the fact that X believes __________________, Y believes __________________________________.

-Even though X and Y believe that __________________, Y qualifies this belief by _________________________________________.

-Whereas X contends that ___________________, Y contends that __________________________.

-Unlike X, Y concludes that ______________________________.