Pieter Brueghel’s painting “Hunters in the Snow” served as inspiration to the two writers Tobias Wolff and William Carlos. When looking at the painting Wolff and Carlos caught the image of a different world within the painting. Each writer tackled a different mode of writing; Wolff manifesting a short story, while Carlos constructed a poem. Although both Wolff and Carlos gaze into the same painting by Breughel, each develops their own realm of “Hunters in the Snow”.
Wolff only appears to take small pieces of the painting to make his short story. Within the story Wolff displays a continuous pattern, always keeping one of the hunters to be belittled. Here at the beginning of the story we see the two hunters Frank and Kenny bullying Tub, "You ought to see yourself," the driver (Kenny) said. "He looks just like a beach ball with a hat on, doesn't he? Doesn't he, Frank”. Then we notice at the end of the story the bullying is focused on Kenny when he is left in the back of the truck to die. Wolff is keeping a consistency of one of the hunters being a victim, looking at the painting on can see that one of the hunters is a complete black silhouette while the other two stand closer together in color to resemble the divide within the hunters. The painting hardly deepens my understanding of Wolff’s story, because in the painting there seems to be a setting of a very populated area while the hunters in Wolff’s story are miles away from town.
On the other hand Carlos uses the painting completely within his poem. The painting definitely helps to understand the poem. Without the painting lines 17-21, “Brueghel the painter
/concerned with it all has chosen/a winter-struck bush for his