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Comparison Paper In the story “The Library Card” the author Richard Wright talked about how the young boy who was referred to as “lil nigger boy” was someone who was trying to better himself by forging a white man’s signature to check out books, while people around him harassed and criticized him for doing so. In “When the Other Dancer is the Self,” Alice Walker talked about how she grew up with a very smug aspect on life where she always thought she was the prettiest or the most beautiful, but one accident when she was younger had an effect on the rest of her life. In the end both authors show the way that their self-esteem was affected by people judging them based on their appearance. In the case of Walker it was her beauty; in the case of Wright, it was his color..
Walker uses the accident that occurred during her childhood to prove that one’s self-esteem can be damaged by the way people react to one’s appearance. Walker experienced people always treating her nicely and telling her she was oh so beautiful until the accident happened where her brother mistakenly shot her in the eye with a pellet gun, and that whole accident change her entire life. “It was great fun being cute. But then, one day, it ended” (442). People viewed her so differently, and they treated her exactly how they viewed her. She kept asking herself and others had she changed. Walker shows contempt for herself by demonstrating the. Throughout the article Walker expresses how after the accident occurred her life was different. People called her names at school when she moved to another school so she had transferred back to her home school.
Wright’s situation was similar to Walkers in a way on how people looked at them, when people judged him and was wondering why he was reading books made him feel uncomfortable as it made her feel very low about herself when they kept asking her about her eye. Richard had asked Falk could he borrow his library card to check out some

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