Internal Conflicts In Cranes And The Wife's Story: A Comparison

Imagine a perfect world where everyone is accepted for who they are, no matter their differences. Unfortunately, that is not always how things work. No matter how hard people try to forgive and forget the past, some people cannot find it in themselves to move on. While Samsong is able to overlook his past friend’s faults, the Wife cannot see through the life altering changes she has found in her husband. In the short stories, Cranes by Hwang Sunwon, and The Wife’s Story by Ursula K. Le Guin, both differ vastly in their settings and characters, however, they share similar internal conflicts.

In these short stories, the settings the authors use differ exceedingly. In Cranes, Sunwon sets the scene as a more hostile environment, while in The Wife’s Story, Le Guin creates a safe environment. As Samsong is first seeing Tokchae for the

Samsong has to decide whether or not he is going to save the life of an old friend, and the Wife has to determine if she is going to stand up for her husband. While Samsong and Tokchae are walking, Samsong orders Tokchae to “go flush a crane” (Sunwon 589). At first Tokchae does not fully comprehend what Samsong is telling him to do, but after remembering how they used to flush cranes as children, he begins to crawl away through the weeds. Rather than Samsong leading Tokchae to his death, Samsong allows his friend to live. In The Wife’s Story, the Wife chooses to act differently even though their internal conflicts are still similar. When the Wife first sees her husband morphing into a new creature, she “[bursts] out into a crazy, awful [howl]” (Le Guin 7) that leads the rest of their pack straight towards them. When the Wife howls, she is not fully understanding what would result from it. Before the Wife has time to fully recover from finding her husband as a human, her sister has already killed