It is a little difficult to make a comparison among three stories that a glance they do not look similar at all. But if we are highly detailed when we era reading and put attention to the minimal details, it is possible to found some things which are comparable.
One of the first things that I found is the type of narrator that the authors used to write the three stories. Thucydides, Dingo and The German Boy have a first person narrator, who is a character of the story and tells us what happened to him or her in a particular time. But there are some differences in the way the characters tell their story. The woman in the first story called Thucydides is remembering something about her past, when she was a girl and started to missing classes.
The guy in Dingo, the second story, is also remembering something that happened to him in the past, but this event did not happen few years ago like in Thucydides, but it is something relatively recent.
And in The German Boy, the action happens at the time we are reading the story, but the guy who tell it make a flashback, because he remember Klaus, the new boy of the class, and he remember the time when he went to school with him.
If we talk about the topic of the three stories, I can say that they are contemporary topics, due to all refer to issues that we see, know or experience during our life. Everybody have had a friend whose parents broke up their marriage and it is easy to understand the sorrow that this fact cause, and also why the girl in Thucydides cries when she discovers her father with a woman that is not her mother.
Also, everybody has had a pet (a dog, a cat and so on) to which we give attention, love, and affection and sometimes we considered as a member of our family.
And in school or day by day, we had had classmates or people that we has met, that are different to us or sometimes we are different to the rest of the class, and we notice the effort that they put to be like the others.
At the same time these topics involve valoric issues which are the faithfulness that the father has not got with the mother of the girl in Thucydides, and the faithfulness that Lucky, the dingo, kept firstly with her owner and finally with her herd; the lie that the girl in Thucydides creates not to go to school, and the lie that the man in The German Boy creates about his job in front of his family.
About the characters of the three stories, I can say that who tells the story is the main character, except in The German Boy, which is Klaus the boy that the narrator refers. In both stories Thucydides and Dingo, we can know more about the feelings of the main characters, because are they who tell the story, so we know the complicated that the girl in Thucydides, felt reading Thucydides (the Greek writer), because as she complained in the story, he was so obscure when he wrote. And also, we know the way her perspective of things change when she discovered what was happen with her father.
The man in Dingo, share his emotions with the reader in a complex way, because he is older than the girl in the first story, he is conscious about what happen with him. He knows that he can not keep the dog with him, therefore he feel foolish with his actions. We can know that he was completely happy when Lucky came back, he cries and he is not regret to do it. Although, he was in charge of the cattle in the countryside, he was prepared to sacrifice his job upon his pet.
In The German Boy it is a little bit difficult to know what happen exactly with the feelings of the main character that is Klaus. We know that Klaus is a foreign boy in England and only with this fact we know that he feels strange in a place that was not his, even though, it seems he made the effort to be like everyone in that school, the narrator emphasizes that the German boy was different to the rest of the class, but we don not know Klaus’s appreciations; we realize that something is wrong with him when the narrator remembers Klaus crying in the room at night and when the boy informed to him that he was going to speak only in German, except to him. To understand Klaus, we need to deduce some things from the tale of the narrator.
In The German Boy we know more about the feelings of the narrator, he is afraid of the situation of the company where he works, because he has not told to anybody that the company is bankrupt. He omitted information to his family.
The title of the book is “British Short Stories of Today”, so immediately we can know that the people of the stories live in England. The story called Thucydides happens in Swansea, a city located in The United Kingdom. In the tale the narrator make an extensive description of the place where she lives, and also she describes the weather of the place.
Dingo happens in Australia, which was a colony of England few years ago. Here the narrator makes a description of the place where he lives and works, but he includes a brief description of the vegetations of the place.
It is possible to now that The German Boy happens in England, because the narrator told that the mother of Klaus married an Englishman, but there is anything that refers to the place where the story happens.
The three stories are very interesting, but for me The German Boy was what I liked most, because the woman that appears at the beginning of the story is a mystery. The narrator creates a lot of fake ideas about her; however, we have to create our own story about her and also about Klaus, because at the end we do not know what happens to him.
