Compare And Contrast Nightingale And Isabelle

War can change a person’s entire way of life. Throughout The Nightingale, by Kristin Hannah, the two main protagonists, Vianne and Isabelle, undergo great changes in their personalities and morals. In the beginning, they are opposites, Isabelle wanting to rebel and resist at any chance she gets, while Vianne wanted nothing more than to stay at home with her child, Sophie. Despite their differences, Vianne and Isabelle learned they had a lot more in common than they had originally thought. In the beginning, Vianne and Isabelle had many differences. Isabelle was bouncing around between different schools, getting expelled from each one. Vianne, the older of the two, had her life more put together. She had a husband, a daughter, a job, and a large house in a small French town, Carriveau. And as the war raged on, the two sisters were brought together in Vianne’s home, but they had very different ideas about the war and their roles. Isabelle expresses her dreams of being a hero to a boy she is having a picnic with. “She rolled toward him, snapping the book shut. It was about Edith Cavell, a nurse in the Great War. A hero. ‘I could be a war hero, Christophe’” (Hannah 34). Here, Isabelle expresses her mind on the war and her goals,

She went from a submissive, timid, mother just trying to survive the war, to someone who executed a Nazi with a shovel. And as Vianne changed, so did Isabelle. She got injured in the Beck altercation, so she had to lay low. Now, she was the one just trying to survive, much like Vianne in the early stages of the war. And as the war escalated to the point where all Jews were being taken away, Vianne only gained more courage when she decided to start hiding Jewish children in an orphanage where she would teach. What makes it more impressive was that she hid all nineteen children while a dangerous Nazi general stayed in her home. Now, Vianne was the one aiding people in the war, and Isabelle was the one who