Compare And Contrast The Baker Heater League And The 11 59

Two minutes to midnight, the stories press forth, but sixty seconds later, for whom this bell tolls, time shall stand still, despite man’s every will… For when it is 11:59, per the tale the league has told, the train will carry him away. The two stories, “The Baker Heater League” and “The 11:59”, though they were both written in the same time frame using similar settings and expanding on development of stories, are fundamentally different in the way information about legends is conveyed and the character development techniques each uses to reach a conclusion. The differences highlighted in this essay will focus mainly on the plot development, where one follows a single person, and the other exposes the process behind a story making it across

When “The Baker Heater League” introduces the character Casey Jones, excerpts from sayings of the porters, such as “Fireman Jumped, but Casey stayed on; he was a good engineer, but he's dead and gon',”(6) which help to convey that he was a legendary man. By contrast, in “The 11:59”, the scope is narrowed to a group of porters, introducing Lester Simmons, the main character, by giving a comparatively prolonged exposition, from which Lester's personality can be compiled. This seems evident through the use of introduction, for instance, “He ate his evening meal at the porter house on Compton Avenue, and hung around till late at night talking union, playing bid whist, and spinning yarns with those who were still ‘travelin’ men,’”(10) which creates an attachment to the character. Later in the stories, which is when it gets interesting, “The Baker Heater League” simply denotes that fact and fiction can often be mixed in an account of events from an old friend, wherein, “…Each teller added or subtracted something until the tale was his own,”(8) but in “The 11:59”, the complex character Lester passes away of a heart attack under the presumption that it was the 11:59 train;

But before you think of this as completely obvious, consider this: the point of these stories is to illustrate the melding of fiction and nonfiction in myths and legends, such as those the porters talk about, so it is actually quite interesting to see such an overlap in the department of the very people and setting the story elaborates on in order to convey the overall message. Starting with the bricks and mortar of the story, the porters in each story all gather round after a day at work to tell their stories, which contributes to the human element of the plot, even in the historic and logical “The Baker Heater League”. The second element in common, building on the first you could say, even with terrible puns aside, is the timeframe. There are several hints in the two texts as to the timeframe; the pocket watch referenced in “The 11:59” suggests no later than the 1930s, and the talk of John Henry suggests no earlier than the Industrial Revolution in the late 1800s, so we really have a gap of no more than 40 years here as our timeframe. For two independent stories to have such similarities helps put into perspective, in turn, their comparability in order to properly compare the characters and setting as