Compare two short stories where the characters face difficult

Compare two short stories where the characters face difficult

situations

We are comparing the stories ‘Flight’ by Doris Lessing and ‘Your

shoes’ by Michele Roberts. They both deal with the issue of daughters

leaving home and how it affects the whole family. In ‘Flight’, the

granddad is affected most severely but in ‘Your Shoes’, it is the

mother. ‘Your Shoes’ is written in a first person narrative from the

mother’s perspective. ‘Flight’ is written in the third person. The

main theme of the stories is growing up and letting go/ moving on.

In ‘Fight’ the granddad is overprotective of the granddaughter and she

craves freedom from him and the atmosphere of the house she has grown

up in. Her granddad makes her feel that getting married and moving

away is wrong, ‘She’ll marry him next, I’m telling you; she’ll be

marrying him next!’. In ‘Your Shoes’ there is a similar theme of over

protectiveness and inability of the guardian to let go. However, in

‘Your Shoes’ the daughter actually runs away from the mother, whereas

in ‘Flight’ the granddad simply feels that she is running away.

The two stories conclude in very different ways. In ‘Flight’ the

granddad symbolises that he is finally ready to let go of his

granddaughter by releasing, if only for a short while, the pigeon that

has symbolised her throughout the whole story. In ‘Your Shoes’ it

contrasts this by the mother becoming increasingly unstable as the

story progresses and ending with her seeming to have a mental

breakdown.

In ‘Flight’ the characters deal with the difficulties very differently

than in ‘Your Shoes’. The granddad in ‘Flight’ tries to lock his

granddaughter away from the world and convince himself he is doing it

for her own good. The gra...

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...of the mother’s family

history, which shows that she didn’t take the side of her mother

either, but went onto her father’s side.

In ‘Flight’ and ‘Your Shoes’ the characters deal with the similar

difficulties very differently. Both authors use symbolism to emphasise

the difficulties or dilemmas, pigeons are used in ‘Flight’ and

trainers are used in ‘Your Shoes’. The symbols in both stories relate

to travelling or a journey. I think that the symbolism is effective in

both stories but more so in ‘Your Shoes’ as the shoes represent

several things; the pureness that the mother wants the daughter to

have, the overbearing nature of the mother, the mother’s obsession

with order and the fact that the mother can communicate better with a

pair of shoes than she can with her own daughter. In comparison, I

enjoyed ‘Your Shoes’ far more and found it more interesting.