Comparison between Shatz and Blod
By Julien
Lots of people get sick sometimes, however, mental and physical sickness are different. In “A Day’s Wait” by Ernest Hemingway, we meet Schatz, a boy who has a bad temperature. He is under the assumption that he will die. In addition he does not want to give anyone else what he has. In “A Stolen Day” by Sherwood Anderson, the boy, Blod, thinks the will die but he thinks he has a disease that he does not really have. The reason for this is that he just wants attention from his mom. In the short stories “A Day’s Wait and “A Stolen Day”, the main characters Schatz and the boy could not be more contrasting characters.
Schatz, who is only nine years old, has a high temperature and feels very sick. Schatz is very caring. For example, on page 302 he says “You can’t come in... you mustn’t get what I have.” This proves that he cares about his loved ones’ well-being and puts others first. Schatz is both brave and foolish. In the beginning of the story, even though he had just admitted to having a headache, when he is told to go back to bed he says, “No, I’m all right.” Finally, Schatz is confused, and this is because he thinks that his temperature was taken in Celsius, not Fahrenheit. Schatz thinks he’s going to die because kids in France told him that “you can’t live with forty-four degrees.” He says “I’ve got a hundred and two” (from page 302.). This shows that Schatz thinks that he has a 102° Celsius temperature and of course if that was the case, there is no way he would be alive. Schatz is physically sick, while Blod in Stolen Day has a mental sickness.
Blod is an attention-craving boy who has self diagnosed himself with a life threatening disease. He has many siblings and wants more attention from his mother. Blod says on page 307, “‘I ache, Ma, I just ache.’ She was pretty busy that day and hadn’t paid much attention to me.” On page 308 it says:“I was having a grand time, having died. Maybe, after they found me and had got me out of the deep pool, Mother would grab me up in her arms and run home with me as she had run