When
explaining a book to someone that hasn’t read it, one would comprise a summary
of the book. The summary consists of an
overview of the book, giving enough information to inform the person of a brief
description of the story, but not too much information so the person cannot
predict what is going to happen.
An
example of a summary is from the book “All The Pretty Horses”, by Cormac
McCarthy. “McCarthy’s landscape is the
southwest of Texas and Mexico between the two wars, a time of uneasy transition,
when horses and motor vehicles share the road and cattle ranches and cowboys
are fading from the landscape. John
Grady Cole, a 16-year-old with a love for horses and a knowledge of them far
beyond his years, senses on some level that the way of life he loves—horses and
cattle ranching—is soon to come to an end.
He and his best friend Lacey Rawlins run away to Mexico in search of
unnamed fulfillment other than the promise of adventure. Their meeting with the enigmatic Jimmy
Blevins is a pivotal event that leads Cole into a series of bittersweet and
violent encounters in a land where the rules are unknown and constantly
changing. When Cole and Rawlins separate
from Blevins and obtain employment on a Mexican cattle ranch, it appears that
they have achieved their idyllic dream.
Their brief association with Blevins, however, collides with Cole’s
affair with Alejandra, the beautiful and willful daughter of the owner of the
ranch. Cole and Blevins soon find
themselves in a situation where neither hope nor mercy exist.”
While
the above summary explains what the story is about, it doesn’t give too much
detailed information, leaving the reader wanting to find out more. The reader will want to read the story, being
intrigued by the summary.
On
the other hand, if one were to analyze this story, there would be no plot, no
description of the story, and no story line.
Instead, by giving an analysis of this book, one would dissect portions
of what the author is trying to say by examining the details and structure of
the writing. An example of an analysis
of All the Pretty Horses, I would state McCarthy shows a time of transition
between two different worlds or cultures, American and Mexican, and how the two
different worlds collide with their differences in criminal punishment. McCarthy portrays the Mexican judicial system
as a harsh, discriminatory system, where a person’s life is literally at the
mercy of this judicial system and the life of the punished lay in someone
else’s hands.
Although
there are similarities between summary and analysis, since the analysis does
have to have some description to get the point you are trying to make about the
book across, the two are extremely different, with two totally different types
of explanations. http://www.bookreporter.com/reviews/all-the-pretty-horses
http://www.picador.com/books/All-the-Pretty-Horses
