Essay Comparing The Dinner Party And You Can T Just Walk On By

In Mona Gardner’s “The Dinner Party” and Borden Deal’s “You Can’t Just Walk On By,” the protagonists are faced with the same situation. They are both confronted by a deadly snake. The protagonists learn the similar lessons: respecting all living creatures and remaining calm and thinking fast to survive danger. Both protagonists are confronted by a deadly snake that was not causing harm to anyone at the time, but each handle the moment differently with the same reason. In “The Dinner Party,” Mrs. Wynnes, the hostess of the dinner, was sitting at her table when she felt the cobra slither across her foot (Gardner). Her first reaction was to stay calm to make sure that she and the others do not provoke the cobra. While in “You Can’t Just Walk On By,” a boy is walking by a creek when he comes across “the biggest water moccasin [he] [has] ever seen” sleeping on the sandbar (Deal 150). He stays calm too, but for the safety of himself and whoever goes through this area; he makes the decision to kill the snake (Deal 150). In each case both protagonists wanted to keep everyone safe, even though one snake is harmed, while the other is not. In both stories the characters know how venomous each snake is. They know that is they do not act properly with either decision they make they or someone else was going to get

The colonel, in “The Dinner Party” mentions that “[a] woman’s unfailing reaction in any crisis… is to scream,” but that is proven wrong by Mrs. Wynnes and it leads to the lesson of remaining calm and thinking fast to survive danger (Gardner). In “You Can’t Just Walk On By” the boy learns his lesson about respecting all living creatures. Once he knew he was safe from the snake he began to think about how he had almost died and saying, “Not ever again would I take life for granted” (Deal 152). Everyone in each story realizes how vulnerable they are to these small, but deadly