Comparative Essay: We Real Cool, The Bet and The Open Boat

📌Category: Literature
📌Words: 614
📌Pages: 3
📌Published: 18 April 2022

Three stories that all show struggle, hard work, and sacrifice. All come together and the same irony is shown within. These short stories cut deep into reality and how society acts in the modern world. ‘We Real Cool” becomes the struggle of taking big risks, while The Bet shows, life lost in time, and “The Open Boat”, sacrifice and truth within people.

 During all the partying in “We Real Cool”, the situational irony tends to show the big mistakes that keep happening, it became exciting and new, “We Jazz June, We Die soon” (Brooks 7-8). Partying continues to obtain fun; however, all and all that happens, the emotions soon kill people. Education holds a very important value in the modern world but when the struggle within abuse and intake causes big problems to occur, “We real cool, We Left school” (Brooks 1-2). The young teens think they became unstoppable and think they made a good decision of leaving school to go enjoy fun and live an eventful life, but the cause and effect deeply cut into reality, “We strike Straight, We Sing sin” (Brooks 4-5). The kids conclude with bad things but then they share joyfully about every bad thing they’ve done. 

As the Banker happens to feel unsteady, some thoughts about the decisions he made in the past “ It was a dark autumn night the old Banker was walking up and down his study and remembering how, fifteen years before, he had given a party one autumn evening”(Chekov 48). The Banker is about the release the Lawyer from his confinement and he thinks back to the horrible bet he made with the Lawyer. During this time of confinement, the Lawyer accepts different emotions about the bet he made years ago. “ To prove to you in action how I despite all that you live by, I pronounce the two million, I once dreamed of as paradise but now despise”(Chekov 56). After 15 years locked away in solitary confinement by choice, the Lawyer thinks deeply about all that he possessed but now lost, “At the table, a man, unlike ordinary people, was sitting motionless. He was a skeleton with the skin drawn back tight over his bones, with long curls like a woman’s, and a shaggy beard” (Chekov 54). Beginning in his early 20s to his early 40s, fifteen years of confinement and half of his life became lost in a blur of time. 

An open boat, about the size of a bathtub. Four people stranded at sea, a hard worker, a faithful, a debater, and a coward. The sea and sky became lifeless with no color, no life, “None of them knew the color of the sky. Their eyes glanced level and were fastened upon the waves that swept toward them. These waves were of the hue of slate, save for the tops, which were foaming white, and all men knew the colors of the sea” (Crane 58). The ship rocked like a noble steed and it determined to never stop, but the brave oiler, Billie kept on rowing, “In the meantime, the oiler and correspondent rowed they sat together in the same seat and each rowed an oar. The oiler took both oars; then the correspondent tools both oars then the oiler; then the correspondent. They rowed and rowed” (Crane 63). Both work hard but, the faithful and coward never put in any work which leads to deep consequences, “In the shallows, face downward, lay the oiler. His forehead touched the sand, between each wave clean of the sea” (Crane 88). Billie worked hard from the start and never gave up, but for all, he accomplished he lost his life.

The irony in the short stories and poems transformers and teaches many important lessons needed for the next generation. The knowledge of knowing when the decision becomes positive or negative, not wasting time on stupid lies, and knowing when to stop sacrificing yourself and stand up for what you needed.

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