Ann Packer's short story "Horse" with Geoffrey Becker's "El Diablo de la Cienega." Comparison and Contrast -- Ann Packer's short story "Horse" versus Geoffrey Becker's "El Diablo de la Cienega."

Victor, from "Geoffrey Becker's "El Diablo de la Cienega" and Elizabeth from Ann Packer's "Horse" are both individualists who excel, in different ways, in solitary pursuits. Victor is a young star basketball player whose skills draw the attention of a man whom he believes is the devil. Elizabeth is an introverted, bookish young woman who excels in reading. However, these two characters are both forced by external family circumstance to come out of their introverted shells as they realize a more expansive version of their evolving adolescent selves. Both characters must draw upon reserves of strength they never knew existed within their souls.

For Victor, the conflict the young man is engaged in, is a masculine narrative of excellence exhibited in a one-on-one basketball match with a man whom he believes is the devil. For Elizabeth, the female adolescent protagonist's narrative of self-exploration is not a tale of success but of failure, namely her failure to become the girl whom she believes her dead father would have preferred to have as a daughter. Victor's success and Elizabeth's failure are both created, in narrative terms, in an artificial way -- that is through the rules of 'game play.' Games provide the narrative structure to both tales and the rules for these young adolescents to find themselves in the world. However,...

Elizabeth finds herself grappling with not only the immediate physical demands of a game, but also the physical demands and stresses that her own physical body's perceived lacking place upon her psyche.
Elizabeth's perceived gifts in reading, furthermore, are not admired as unequivocally as are Victor's have upon her psyche. Victor sees himself confidently as a gifted athlete, while Elizabeth sees her body as inadequate to the demands of the game she has chosen to prove herself at. Thus the game functions differently in the narrator's perceptions, the structure of the tale's evolution in a linear or a more discursive fashion, and also in terms of whether the character sees the structure of the game as frustrating, as in the case of Elizabeth, or holding the potential for salvation or damnation, as does Victor. The competitive crux of the game-narrative in "Horse" also takes place off-stage, because it is less central to the character's positive development, as opposed to the more physical Victor and the more physical life of the young male protagonist, in "El Diablo de la Cienega"…