The Jungle and In the Waiting Room

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Recommended: Narrative writing about immigration

In today’s world immigration and emigration has vastly increased. With these increased movements around the world, the lack of communication creates many consequences. Without a language in common the attempt at communication is a difficult process. In The Jungle, Upton Sinclair explores the consequences of language barriers through a new immigrant family. The Lithuanian family do not have the language skills required for their new life in America and everyday life is a struggle. The problems that rise from a lack of communication lead to a path of destruction for the family. Additionally, these problems eventually lead to devastation, manipulation and cause mental and physical health issues. So, Sinclair presents the consequences they face from inadequate communication in a negative light. The language barriers in the story seem to cause horrific and severe incidents to the characters. Also, in the short story, “In the Waiting Room”, David Sedaris explores consequences due to his personal language barrier in his time in Paris. He explores different incidents he has experienced due to little knowledge about the French language. Even though consequences arise from his misfortune, Sedaris turns his personal stories into humorous stories. Thus the approach Sedaris takes lowers the severity of the consequences and makes the story more entertaining and appealing. While both texts use a story to demonstrate the faults of miscommunication, literary elements can be used to show differences in the text. Therefore, Sedaris and Sinclair use similar techniques to express similar themes, but the difference in tone, point of view and plot arrangement of the texts demonstrates the theme of the texts contrastingly.
The tone of writing is used to...

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...guage barriers and the results in much different ways. Using different pacing in the stories, the outcomes of language barriers are different. Sinclair uses pacing to create more severe consequences and Sedaris uses pacing to show different situations for language barriers and different results. Through different elements in the texts, the concept of language barriers are explored and illustrated.

Works Cited

Ahmed, Irfan. "Immigrant Consumer Experiences and Marketing Activities in the Early 20th Century: A Reading of Upton Sinclair’s ‘The Jungle’."

Sedaris, David. "Reflections: In the Waiting Room." The New Yorker 18 Sept. 2006: n. pag. Web. 26 Feb. 2014.

Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. New York City, New York, USA: Doubleday, 1906. Print.

Tam, Clarence C. "Migration and health: fact, fiction, art, politics." Emerging Themes in Epidemiology 3.1 (2006): 1-15.

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