Short Story Compare And Contrast Essay

       I recently read three short stories for school and was directed to select two of them to compare and contrast. For this essay I chose The Machine That Won The War, by Issac Asimov and The Story Of An Hour, by Kate Chopin both of which display foreshadowing and various devices of irony. I will  provide examples from each of the stories to support my points.
       The Machine That Won The War is about the Multivac; a craftily designed machine that allegedly won a war against the opposing planet 'Deneb'. The Multivac was programmed to calculate fail-safe fighting tactics which are then forwarded to the General to follow through on the machine's  instructions. The Chief Programmer John Henderson would feed the machine information which would then be translated by Max Jablonsky the Chief Interpreter who would then send the completed instructions to Lamar Swift the Executive of Director of The Solar Federation. The Story Of an Hour is focused on Louise Mallard, a woman with a frail heart and her coping with her husbands' supposed death.
       As I've mentioned before, both writers incorporate irony into their stories, however, they use different types. Verbal irony which was depicted in The Machine That Won The War, is when what is said is contrary to reality or twisting the meaning of what you say and is closely related to sarcasm. On the other hand, The Story Of An Hour uses situational irony, which is the occurrence of an unexpected outcome to a situation or the opposite result of an assumption.
        In The Machine That Won The War verbal irony is used when Swift sarcastically admitted that he won the war, alluding to his method of decision making; a flip of a coin. He states, "Multivac is not the first computer, friends, nor the best-known, nor the one that can most efficiently lift the load of decision from the shoulders of the executive. A machine did win the war, John; at least a very simple computing device did; one that I used every time I had a particularly hard decision to make." The Story of An Hour uses situational irony by depicting the emotional roller coaster Louise experienced upon being informed that her husband had dies in an accident while he was in fact still alive, after she is shocked by the reality of the fact, she herself dies. 

       These two stories share a theme of misinformation, in The Machine That Won The War, the entire population of earth is led to believe that the war was won by the Multivac's calculations when in reality all the important decisions were decided by a simple man and the flip of a coin. in The Story Of An Hour poor Mrs. Louise is informed that her husband has perished in a terrible accident when outside of her knowledge he was alive and well.

        However, the outcomes of  the character being misinformed are very different, In The Machine That Won The War the blindness to the reality of the matter brought peace and hope to the minds of the population while Mrs. Louise, upon discovering she had been misinformed, was too overwhelmed with emotion causing her heart to fail her. 

         In conclusion these two stories have similar themes but very different situational outcomes. Only having partial knowledge of truth can be detrimental and each story showed the consequences of that.