preview

Summary Of A Sunrise On The Veld And At The Pitt Rivers

Decent Essays

The short stories, “A Sunrise on the Veld” and “At the Pitt Rivers”, have nothing in common if you analyze them on a shallow literature level. “A Sunrise on the Veld” by Doris Lessing, highlights some of the reasons why life is so valuable. Lessing hints her readers that this short story is set somewhere in the desert by, “ … the flesh of his soles contracted on the chilled earth, and his legs began to ache with cold… He slung the shoes over his shoulder… they would be necessary when the ground became too hot to bear,” (Lessing, pg. 1212). Most deserts get heated by the sun by day, but loses the heat at night. The boy starts hunting, at first, but then is distracted by a wounded buck. Seeing this buck suffer, depicts him, especially sad. A boy is also the protagonist in “At the Pitt Rivers” by Penelope Lively. This boy spends his time in a museum, observing people and writing poems as the time passes. He keeps track of a couple he sees at the museum. The couple catches his attention because they are not his “ideal” of what a couple should look like. If a kindergartener reads these two short stories, he/she would find nothing in common with the stories. But, if the reader has the ability to analyze the text in more depth, he/she would find that they are more similar than the kindergartener would think.
As an advanced reader, a comparison that is prevalent in both stories is, society’s thinking of the “ideal” can be challenged by with what you see. In “A Sunrise on the

Get Access