Honors English Portfolio Paper #2

2.

The literary piece “Butterflies” by Roger Dean Kiser, is a classic short story, told in first person about a young boy around the age of 6 or 7 who has a tremendous passion for beauty. Through this story, you can see an emotional change from the narrator by the experience he tells about. “Butterflies”, shows a great amount of literary diversity throughout the story which makes it a challenging and complex story to read. In this story, the author, Roger Dean Kiser, uses many literary devices, simple and complex ways of getting a point across, and even touching the readers emotions to explain how an event in life can change you forever.
In the first sentence of the short story “Butterflies” the narrator says, “There was a time in my life when beauty meant something special to me”. This foreshadows that he had lost the specialness of beauty in his life, and he was going to tell about the moment in time that he lost the significant feeling of beauty in his life. As he went into explanation of daily life at the orphanage, he would state he would make his bed, march to breakfast, and back to the dormitory, “just like the little soldier that I had become”, indicating through the use of a simile, that the life living at the orphanage was like the life of a soldier. The reason he used this device is because, he did his chores and expectations day after day the same way before he would join the line of the boys doing the same and then marched together to go to breakfast. Then, as the narrator explains the Saturday morning where he had seen the house parent chasing the monarch butterflies who lived in the bushes outside of the orphanage you could tell that the author had changed the tone of the story. With the change in tone, it wa...

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...ant to see beautiful things, like the butterfly, suffer.
Roger Dean Kiser did a tremendous job with this piece in my opinion. The way he was able to execute showing the narrators change of heart from beginning to end stood out to me. He really showed this through very evident and simple ways to much more complex ways of showing the reader that the narrator was changing. Also, it stood out to me that the author turned the narrator into a protagonist to get the point about that experience changing his life across, by tapping into the readers’ sympathetic side.
This classic story shows the way things along the road of life can change your full outlook on it, even if you are as young as 6 or 7. The emotional change and change in tone greatly demonstrates this for the reader. In addition to that, the complexity shows the reader these changes in many different forms.