Contrast & juxtaposition

Divisions in the world

When we want to talk about the world in a big picture way, making broad generalisations, we tend to put people and things into groups, and this becomes a source of contrast and juxtaposition.

Group of girls walks near a similar group of geese
Putting people in groups becomes a source of contrast and juxtaposition. Photo by Josef Koudelka (Source)

In this snippet from The House on Mango Street, Esperanza makes one such division: 

The boys and the girls live in separate worlds. The boys in their universe and we in ours.

The House on Mango Street(1984)

Note that for this particular snippet, there is no description or judgment about each group. Esperanza only defines the boundaries.

(The rest of the book is about what happens in each of those worlds, both separately and when they mix.)

Here are two similar examples of dividing the world into contrasting categories:

The land is young compared to the sea. Our oldest civilisations are foam compared to the things that exist in those dark and ancient depths.

At the supermarket there are the kids who work because their parents think it’s character-building, and the kids who work because they need the money.

  • Think about the world you've built so far in this lesson, and then zoom out to take a wider perspective. 
  • What kind of broad divisions exist in this world? What are ways of grouping people or places, and how are the groups different?
  • Summarise that division as simply and quickly as you can.
Divide your world into two contrasting groups or forces.

In this part of the lesson, we've explored lots of ways in which we can use contrast and juxtaposition to describe elements in a story. 

We could keep going, but we won't! It's time to move on to a new aspect of contrast: using it to create specific emotional effects.

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