Ice Wagon Going Down The Street Sparknotes

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There is a fine line between, drawing inspiration from a piece, and plagiarizing from it. In the short story, “Ice Wagon going down the Street”, by Mavis Gallant, the piece revealed the struggle of adjusting to a new environment, and learning who and whom you truly are. The story, emphasizes the modern social caste, and a tale between a man named Peter and Agnes. The differences in their believes and achievements, an unlikely pair, who lead each other to finding their purpose. This great theme, and story line was replicate by a more recent author, Sadia Shepard writing the short story, “Foreign Returned”, who’s story line is uncannily similar to that of “Ice Wagon Going Down the Street”. Shepard tells the story, with Hassan and Hina, two Pakistani-Americans, …show more content…

Shepard had taken her story, omitted some minute details and resubmitted the story as her own. Even though Quinlan had originally given her the benefit of the doubt, the resemblance of the two was too great for her as well. Looking further into Quinlan’s reaction to the piece, Quinlan points out the similarities between the plots of the two stories, to further show the plagiarism that had taken place. She created two lists that outline the plot line of either story that aids to show the similarities. The outlines show how between the pieces it was the same series of events, however with small minute details that were changed to appropriate each piece accordingly. This helped to articulate the consensus ,made by Quinlan, that Shepard had copied too much of Gallant’s story. As the amount of Gallant’s piece Shepard used was too great. This deprived the originality from her own story, revealing it to be rather plagiarized. Rather then drawing inspiration from the piece as Shepard hoped, she had instead copied too much of the story to call it her own. Plagiarism, is a crime under U.S. Law, under this law it can be argued that Shepard had plagiarized from Gallant’s work. The law outlines several different rules or criteria that a person must break in order for it to considered to be plagiarized. When looking under the infractions of that law, it can be found that, “copying so many words or ideas from a source …show more content…

I believe that it is a black and white topic, either you plagiarized whether it be you copied it form word from or you or copied the ideas from another piece. Shepard had copied too much Gallant’s piece. This infringed the ability for someone to say that she inspiration from their piece. Under both the definition and the U.S.A. laws for plagiarism, the copying of someone else’s ideas is considered to be plagiarism. Shepard plots coincided with that of Gallant’s too greatly. Similary, Quinlan pointed out in her article as a reaction to this, that the similarities between the two pieces revealed it to be great and taking apart Gallant’s story and adding a small twist to call it her own.

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