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Comparison Of Through The Tunnel And Big Boy Leaves Home

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Through the Tunnel and Big Boy Leaves Home have a multitude of differences, but at the core, they are incredibly similar stories. Through the Tunnel is, at first glance, simply a story of a young English boy who, despite the incredibly dangerous conditions, sets a challenge for himself. He wants, almost to the point of obsession, to swim through an underwater tunnel and prove himself as capable as the older boys. On the other hand, Big Boy Leaves Home is about an African American adolescent from the Deep South during the height of post-Civil War racism. It is a rather brutal account of Big Boy’s innocence being stripped away at the murder of his friends and his own accidental killing of the murderous white man. He then has to flee home, watch his surviving friend tortured to death, and even kill to survive. It may have only been a dog that he killed, but it truly illustrates how much he has changed over the course of the tory and how desperate he is. At the surface, these stories seem to have little similarity beyond the age and gender of the main characters. …show more content…

They both hear The Call in their lives and risk death to answer it. Although the Call comes from incredibly different sources, they both seem to be unable to do anything but answer it. Big Boy had the choice between leaving home or dying, but in Jerry’s situation it seems as though he could have very easily decided to ignore the tunnel’s challenge and remain with his mother. However, Through the Tunnel makes it clear that besting the tunnel was such a compulsion and obsession for him that stopping my not have been a possibility. The Call preyed on them in such a way that the boys were more or less forced into

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