TITLE ABOUT COMPARATIVE ESSAYS
Every single living person has an identity that is constantly changing. This is because each identity is shaped by one’s experiences, as proven by Lena Coakley’s story "Mirror Image" and James Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” as the main characters in each story deals with the concept of identity. “Mirror Image” is a non-linear story about a fourteen year-old girl named Alice who is the survivor of a car crash and is forced to get a brain transplant, putting her brain into the body of another child roughly her child. “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” deals with an ordinary man in his day-to-day life, while he intersplices his routine actions with daydreams of wild and unfulfilled daydreams. While the stories are very different from each other, they both contain characters
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In "Mirror Image", though Alice struggles to realize who she is regarding identity, she soon came to the conclusion that “[she is] here” before “[walking] home” (18). In this, Alice decides by herself who she believes herself to be. Additionally, a similar instance occurs in “"The Secret Life of Walter Mitty".” When asked about himself, Walter pauses and insists that he is “thinking” and asks his wife if “it ever occurs to [her] that [he is] thinking?” (37). In order to understand who he is, Mitty reflects upon himself. By this comparison, the main characters in both "Mirror Image" and "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" are similar on the account that their internal conflict is the guiding point in the story, as identity is decided upon from within as opposed to from merely their outside influences. In relation to this, the main characters are also the focus of both stories by the limited point of view the stories are told