The Giver Comparative Essay

Dragons, witches, princesses and knights. These are the imaginary friends in so many children's lives. For young adults, those fairy tale characters give way to darker characters and more realistic situations. However, what do they all have in common? The live in short stories. Two short stories that are interesting are "The Cask of Amontillado" by Edgar Allen Poe and "The Giver" by Lois Lowry. They seem like very different stories, but they have more similarities than you think.
The main characters of both stories are similar in characterization because both Amontillado and Jonas change throughout the story, even if the progression of either change is much different in length. Even so, they do both change drastically throughout their stories. Jonas turns from a regular "Twelve", as so claimed by Lois Lowry, to being chosen as the "Receiver of Memory", being given much more authority for his position, and allowed to bend and break rules without consequences, whereas Amontillado lets his thoughts control him and change him into the sinister man near the end, when he bricks Fortunato in the cellar after he had a few too many glasses of wine. They do both experience drastic changes throughout
Amontillado's change...is a little more morbid. He changes from an every day man, nonchalantly showing another man his family's cask cellars, to basically a murderer. He builds up a wall of mortar and bricks, blocking in the man he oh-so despised. The story did also foreshadow that Amontillado would eventually snap towards the beginning, so it was a little more predictable than Jonas' change, of course, for first time readers. Amontillado's change was also more blunt than Jonas' change. Amontillado went straight into bricking the drunken man in, while Jonas eased into his. It started with the "Chief Elder" skipping over him in the "Ceremony of