Alike Yet Different

Author’s Note: This is my compare and contrast essay. I used the characters for my compare and contrast piece, but an essay would have more information about how these  characters are alike: Reynie from the book The Mysterious Benedict Society and Violet from Paperquake.

Sometimes it’s easy to find a character from one book that’s like or not alike from a character in a different book.  Characters should be classified as alike if they act the same way. So if one character is brave and confident and another character is timid and shy, they wouldn’t be alike. Sometimes characters grow during books in the same way. They start out as mean, and end up becoming nice, then they also would be alike. I found that Reynie from The Mysterious Benedict Society and Violet from Paperquake were similar yet opposite in many different ways.

Reynie Muldoon started out as an orphan, often picked on by the people he saw every day: the other kids at the orphanage. Violet Jackstone started out being in a family of with sisters who always picked on her because she was born with a heart defect. She was also bullied by people at school. Reynie saw an ad in the paper for “special” and “talented” children to take a test. At the time, Reynie didn’t know what was coming. Violet started finding these notes addressed to her nickname, and she didn’t expect that the clues would lead to something so big. What happened to both of them was something that they didn’t know would happen.

As I mentioned before, they didn’t know that they would end up in a huge adventure to solve a mystery, so this is why they didn’t feel like they were brave. Both characters didn’t feel like they were brave when their adventures started. They didn’t have confidence that they could do something for themselves, and they didn’t think that anyone liked them because they didn’t get the support that made them more confident. Violet’s family and peers didn’t think that she was capable of doing anything for herself. Peers, sisters, and even parents thought that she was just a weak little girl. Reynie was bullied into thinking that nobody wanted to be his friend, or his family. As their stories went on, they figured out that with the help of the right people, they were actually brave, but it just took time to figure it out for themselves.

One of the few things that are different between Reynie and Violet is that Violet had a whole family: Parents and siblings. She wasn’t adopted like Reynie. He lived in an orphanage because he didn’t have a family. There was a woman who worked at the orphanage: Her name was Ms. Perumal and she was the closest thing to a mom that Reynie had. Ms. Perumal was the only one who saw potential in Reynie, because she had taught him everything that he needed to know and more. Violet had a family, but they didn’t support her. Reynie didn’t have a family at all, but someone that he was close to taught him to believe that he was smart enough to do whatever he wanted to when he got older.

As you can see, characters in books can be alike yet different in many ways. They were alike in ways that also could also make them different from each other. Both of them weren’t sure about who they really were, but as their stories continued, they figured out that they were brave after all.