"Young Man on 6th Avenue" by Mark Halliday and "The Hand" by Sidonie-Grabrielle Colette have many things in common. The most profound similarity is how the stories end. In both stories the characters start out happy and without worries. In the end they see what they think is going to be, is not going to be. "Young Man on 6th Avenue" and "The Hand" use a combination of plot, symbols, setting, and characters to show that life is not always what we see on the outside, that they should take a deeper look.
Plot is the arranging of events in a story. The author puts events in a specific order to give the story structure. In "Young Man on 6th avenue" and "The Hand" the authors start the characters off having perfect lives. Then as the story progresses there are changes in their lives. When the character in "Young Man on 6th Avenue" gets older he realizes that his whole life changes dramatically. When the character says "those years" he is implying that as the years go by, he comes to fear the things he did not when he is younger (Halliday 943). In "The Hand" the story begins with the husband and wife lying in bed, and the wife is enjoying her life at the moment. Later on she begins to recognize that her husband is not what she thinks he is. Her husband's hand begins to scare her, but she gives into the role of the dutiful wife and lives with it. It is ironic that in "The Hand" the wife's revelation is that something is wrong the next morning, and in "Young Man on 6th Avenue" it takes the man a lifetime to see. In both stories, in the end, there is nothing done about their mistakes. .
Symbols appear all around us. Without symbols our life is dreary and empty. A symbol is something that suggests more than it's literal meaning. For example, the most outstanding symbol in "The Hand" is the hand of the husband. The hand represents the fear in the wife, as she realizes that her husband isn't the perfect man she thinks him to be.