Comparing Coraline And The Graveyard Book

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The author Neil Gaiman published the two books, Coraline and The Graveyard Book. Both of these texts were inspired from fictional masterpieces Alice in Wonderland and The Jungle Book. Neil would watch his daughter, normal and yet brave, from this he came up with the idea of writing of a young girl who was forced to be brave in an Alice in Wonderland type situation. Neil also received inspiration to write The Graveyard Book from his child, this time his son. They lived across the street from a graveyard and Neil would take his son to the graveyard a lot and let him ride around on his tricycle. Upon seeing how at home Neil's son was in the graveyard, Neil came up with the idea of a boy being raised in a graveyard like Mowgli was raised in the jungle. Both Coraline and The Graveyard Book have a…show more content…
He does this by writing interesting, children level novels, but he adds complex figurative language and other literary devices to help appeal to the more knowledgeable following. The main character of The Graveyard Book is a young boy named Nobody “Bod” Owens. Bod is raised by ghosts in a graveyard because his parents were both murdered when he was a baby. Bod became a free-spirited young boy and was anti-social, “You are a vacant doorway. You are nothing. Eyes will not see you. Minds will not hold you. Where you are is nothing and nobody,” (Gaiman 48). Through this quote, the figurative language likens the young boy to nothing and it makes him seem like a bird, unchained and free. Gaiman also uses similes to set a tone for a scene such as, “His shoes were black leather, and they were polished to such a shine that they looked like dark mirrors: you could see the moon reflected in them, tiny and half full,” (Gaiman 6). Neil sets a dark tone with this quote, using a simile linking his shoes and dark mirrors which foreshadowed darkness and bad things to come. A large similarity between the two books is the amount of figurative language found in them. In the

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