The selected passage from Jamaica Kincaid’s novel Lucy: A Novel emphasizes an explicit conflict between the narrator’s immediate and expected joy over being able to experience relative luxury for the first time against the implicit force of her inner schock and realization of her past situation as it ties into and shapes her identity and perspective of the world at large. The first paragraph details the specifics of her past situation through direct thoughts of the reader and her way of describing the luxury she’s in as presented through slightly clumsy, almost uncomfortable syntax, whether she “got into an elevator, some [she] had never done before,” (1-2) or when she was “eating food just taken from a refrigerator.” (3) She says that the experience in the apartment, compared to her home, “was such a good idea that [she] would grow used to it and like it very much.” …show more content…
The word “morning” is repeated four times after the narrator’s first night in the apartment, as if to reassure herfeld that the world and future ahead of her is still as normal as it would ever be. Later on, though, these expectations are flipped, with the sun appearing pale instead of bright, not to mention the shining at all in a freezing mid-January day, a way to physically prepare the narrator for understanding her situation. This then takes on a somewhat meta-textual path, with the narrator looking back on her impatience with selfish protagonists wanting more only to be happier with what they once had only to realize that the narrator, like those protagonists, did feel homesick and longed for the more natural feel of her original home, emphasized by the cultural detail of dreaming of eating a certain Caribbean dish by her grandmother to contrast against the manufactured phoniness of the
The author illustrates the “dim, rundown apartment complex,” she walks in, hand and hand with her girlfriend. Using the terms “dim,” and “rundown” portrays the apartment complex as an unsafe, unclean environment; such an environment augments the violence the author anticipates. Continuing to develop a perilous backdrop for the narrative, the author describes the night sky “as the perfect glow that surrounded [them] moments before faded into dark blues and blacks, silently watching.” Descriptions of the dark, watching sky expand upon the eerie setting of the apartment complex by using personification to give the sky a looming, ominous quality. Such a foreboding sky, as well as the dingy apartment complex portrayed by the author, amplify the narrator’s fear of violence due to her sexuality and drive her terror throughout the climax of the
In the passage from the novel LUCY, author Jamaica Kincaid dramatizes the forces of self and environment, through her character whose identity is challenged with a move. The new home provided all she needed, but it was all so many changes, she “didn’t want to take in anything else” (15-16). Her old “familiar and predictable past”(40) stayed behind her, and she now had to find who she was in her new life. Kincaid uses detail, metaphor, and tone in the passage to show her character’s internal struggle.
Walk through a door, and enter a new world. For John, raised in home resplendent with comfort and fine things, Ginny’s family’s apartment above the fruit market is a radically different environment than his own. Economic differences literally smack him in the face, as he enters the door and walks into towel hung to dry. “First lesson: how the poor do laundry” (Rylant 34). In this brief, potent scene, amidst “shirts, towels, underwear, pillowcases” hanging in a room strung with clotheslines, historical fiction finds crucial expression in the uncomfortable blush of a boy ready for a first date and unprepared for the world in which he finds himself.
In 1492, Christopher Columbus in his quest to validate his claim that the world was round and that it should belong to his Spanish patrons, the king and queen of Spain, set sail on his ship Santa Maria. He soon discovered the “New World”, which was new to him, but not to the Antiguans who lived there. Cultural imperialism was one of the most prominent means Western countries like Spain and Britain used to colonize other parts of the world at the beginning of the fifteenth century. The Cambridge dictionary defines cultural imperialism as one “culture of a large and powerful country, organization, etc. having a great influence on other less powerful country.”
Baldwin gives a vivid sketch of the depressing conditions he grew up on in Fifth Avenue, Uptown by using strong descriptive words. He makes use of such word choices in his beginning sentences when he reflects back to his house which is now replaced by housing projects and “one of those stunted city trees is snarling where our [his] doorway used to be” (Baldwin...
In the short story, "Girl," by Jamaica Kincaid, the character of the mother can be seen as tyrannical. This oppressive trait of hers is reiterated several times throughout this story. It is first displayed in her initial remarks, rather than asking her daughter to do things, she lists things in a robotic manner, "Wash the white clothes on Monday, wash the colored clothes on Tuesday." Not only is she robotic, but she appears to believe that she has been sent to save her daughter from promiscuity. Her narcissistic viewpoint of being a savior is one that is consistent with that of a tyrant. This perspective is evident through commands such as "try to walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming." She abuses her parental power
In the stanzas of Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, the speaker very honestly observes the scenes from outside her apartment. From her point of view, she sees a both a bird and a dog in the process of sleeping. The speaker views these animals as having simple lives unbothered by endless questions or worries. Instead, the two live peaceful, uninterrupted existences, rising every morning knowing that “everything is answered” (ln. 22). However, the speaker lives in contrast to this statement instead anxiously awaiting the next day where uncertainty is a likely possibility. Unlike the dog and the bird, the speaker cannot sit passively by as the world continues in its cycle and she carries a variety of emotions, such as a sense of shame. It is evident here that the speaker has gone through or is currently undergoing some sort of struggle. When she states that “Yesterday brought to today so lightly!” she does so in longing for the world to recognize her for her issues by viewing the earth’s graces as so light of actions, and in doing so, she fails to recognize that she can no longer comprehend the beauty of nature that it offers her. In viewing the light hitting the trees as “gray light streaking each bare branch” (ln. 11), she only sees the monotony of the morning and condescends it to merely “another tree” (ln. 13.) To her, the morning is something
Girl by Jamaica Kincaid is a piece about a mother speaking to her very young daughter who is entering adolescence, advising her very specifically how to behave. Kincaid’s use of tone, repetition, intensity, and perspective help shape the main idea that being a female is nearly impossible and that women have to act a certain way with everything they do, even if they lack integrity with these actions.
Ranging from caged parrots to the meadow in Kentucky, symbols and settings in The Awakening are prominent and provide a deeper meaning than the text does alone. Throughout The Awakening by Kate Chopin, symbols and setting recur representing Edna’s current progress in her awakening. The reader can interpret these and see a timeline of Edna’s changes and turmoil as she undergoes her changes and awakening.
Kate Chopin delivers The Awakening in a somber and serious tone. This is shown throughout the whole book, like in the quote, “She had forced herself to eat most of her soup, and now she was picking the flaky bits of a court bouillon with her fork” (page 42), and “Edna looked straight before her with a self-absorbed expression upon her face. She felt no interest in anything around her. The street, the children, the fruit
but I remembered her tiny loft back in Brooklyn that I had visited once or twice when I was younger. The door creaked open and revealed hardwood floors and exposed brick walls that made me strangely nostalgic for industrial living spaces. Our home in Edinburgh was far more traditional than this small two bedroom modernised apartment. I dumped my rucksack onto the bed in the spare room that Allison had made up for me before she left and decided to explore the apartment - not that there was a lot to
Analysis: This quote shows that the setting was at one point different to the author. It was not glossy and new.
To begin, the story opens with a family receiving a visit by a stranger on a November evening. Since the author uses words like “chill, damp, deepening dusk” (Oates 325) to describe the condition of the
Most people agree that Edgar Allan Poe wrote "Annabel Lee" about his departed wife, Virginia Clemm, who died of tuberculosis two years earlier. Some critics, however, contend that in the seventh line of the poem he states, "I was a child and she was a child," and he certainly was no child in 1836 at twenty-seven when he married his thirteen-year-old bride. Maybe the poem is about an earlier love, or perhaps it is purely fictional, but addressing Annabel Lee as his "life and [his] bride" in line thirty-eight and writing it two years after his beloved young wife's death, it is seems logical that it is indeed written about her and is simply embellished with a bit of poetic license.
The opening paragraph (page264) shows the scene of Miss Brill walking to the café, there’s a description of her feelings during her walk, “And when she breathed, something light and sad – no, not sad, exactly – something gentle seemed to move in her bosom.” She has a keen sense to things, including her breath and even the sentiment of it. She is satisfied and proud to own a mind swarming with sophistication. In our point of view as readers, her complacency is just an illusion that builds up on her desolation and pretension.