Waiting For Dan Analysis

After a close examination of the two short stories A Letter Home and Waiting for Dan, there were a lot of protests throughout both stories. Some of the protests worked out for the best, and others did not. So, after reading both stories, there are two similarities and two differences that are very important to understand. A similarity shown between Waiting for Dan and A Letter Home is the main characters (Dan’s wife and Kara) have changed in some way, whether it would be themselves or their family, a change has been shown. For example, on paragraph 9 of the story Waiting for Dan, Dan’s wife discusses how her two sons have changed. “Now it’s fall, and our two sons, Eric and Peter, should be playing football, but they are not… They have quit

In Waiting for Dan, during the freedom rides, they state that there were dangers to the freedom rides, yet Dan wanted to do them anyway. After going on the freedom ride, what happens next is bad. “Like two worried old men, they discuss politics and write letters to the White House. All of this is because my husband is now sitting in a prison in Mississippi” (9). After going on a Freedom Ride, Dan gets arrested and is in prison. In A Letter Home, 1,000 Ohio National Guardsmen are pointing innocent college students at gunpoint, and this is the outbreak. “By now you know the end of it all from the news. Four Kent State students died, and nine students were wounded” (6). These are two of the many similarities found in this story, but there are also many differences as

In Waiting for Dan, the time that this took place was the early sixties, or the Civil Rights Movement. As stated in paragraph 4, “the whites would frequent the blacks-only areas and the blacks would go into the white-only areas.” So, the Freedom Rides and everything that was happening was done about ten years earlier than in A Letter Home. The exact date in which Kara is writing the letter is May 5, 1970. Basically, around the seventies was the time of the Vietnam War. As stated in paragraph 2, “Many students were outraged when they heard that U.S. soldiers had invaded Cambodia on April 30.” The time period is actually a really key factor because time can explain for what reason did this happen. That is why I believe the time difference is a key difference between the two