The fact that they’re 24 carrot gold indicates that she wants the best for herself and her new life. It also symbolizes her purity and strength as a person. In one way the bracelet metaphorically represents the imprisonment of her marriage, the bracelet is like Huang Tai Tai’s oppression over her and she could not escape. Another way to interpret it is that the gold bracelet is “twenty-four carats”, all pure, genuine and strong. It symbolizes Lindo, it is her strength that she is able to take control of her fate, and gives her the strong sense of self and individuality, that she will not let anything affect her in forgetting her true self, and her true belonging to her own family.
In 1983, author Margaret Atwood published the short story Happy Ending. It is written in third person swapping from limited to omniscient, though ultimately being told directly toward the reader finishing off with second person and sentences talking directly to the reader mixed in along the way. The story consists of letters going from A to F, with every letter telling of some scenario that takes place involving the only five characters: John, Mary, Madge, James and Fred. Story A holds the typical boy meets girl, falls in love, marry and live happily ever after until death. With this familiar story, it is granted the title Happy Ending and becomes the symbol that the rest of the story will build off of.
No relationship is ever perfect no matter how great it seems. In the novel The Joy Luck Club, written by Amy Tan, she tells the story of a few mother daughter pairs that are in a group named the Joy Luck Club. The Joy Luck Club is a group of women who come together once a week to play mahjong. The founder of the Joy Luck Club, Suyuan Woo, dies, leaving her daughter Jing-mei to take her place in the club. Her daughter, Jing-mei, receives money from the other members of the club to travel to China in order to find her mother's twin daughters who were left many years ago. In this book you get more of the details of this family and a few more. Amy Tan uses the stories of Jing-mei and Suyuan, Waverly and Jindo, and An-mei and Rose to portray her theme of, mother daughter relationships can be hard at times but they are always worth it in the end.
An accident can take away lives, either literally or figuratively. In The Pod, a short story by Maureen Crane Wartski, the main character, Jesse realizes there is more to life than being able to play soccer as he sees a dolphin out of the water, struggling for its life. The story’s symbolism and irony make one think of the significance of living life.
In the novel, The Joy Luck Club, the author Amy Tan, uses figurative language to create an effect on the readers. Tan uses similes, metaphors, and symbolism, to add to the overall message of the relationships between mother and daughter and bond between them that has been inherited. However, Tan also uses language to show the connection between storytelling, memories, and inheritance.
Throughout Amy Tan’s novel, The Joy Luck Club, the reader can see the difficulites in the mother-daughter relationships. The mothers came to America from China hoping to give their daughters better lives than what they had. In China, women were “to be obedient, to honor one’s parents, one’s husband, and to try to please him and his family,” (Chinese-American Women in American Culture). They were not expected to have their own will and to make their own way through life. These mothers did not want this for their children so they thought that in America “nobody [would] say her worth [was] measured by the loudness of her husband’s belch…nobody [would] look down on her…” (3). To represent everything that was hoped for in their daughters, the mothers wanted them to have a “swan- a creature that became more than what was hoped for,” (3). This swan was all of the mothers’ good intentions. However, when they got to America, the swan was taken away and all she had left was one feather.
These two different gifts play totally opposite role in XiuXiu’s life. The kaleidoscope represents intangible beauty and wont last long, and the apple is a sign of evil desire.
In Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” irony is an underlying theme used throughout the story. The setting is introduced as a “clear and sunny” day, but ends with the brutal death of a housewife (715). The two people who essentially run the town, Mr. Graves and Mr. Summers, also have ironic names. In addition, the characters and the narrator make ironic statements throughout the story.
Susan Gable’s Trifles is focused on discovering the killer of a local farmer in the twentieth century. In this play the amount of irony is abundant and the irony always relates to solving the murder. The two types of irony that are most easily discerned in Trifles are verbal and situational irony. Irony is when an author uses words or a situation to convey the opposite of what they truly mean. Verbal irony is when a character says one thing but they mean the other. This can be seen in the way the men dismiss the women. Situational irony is when the setting is the opposite of what one would think it would be for what the play is. This is seen through the setting being in a kitchen and various other aspects of the
She explains that her deceased father gave her the watch before she and her bother were evacuated from the country because of the war. He gave her this watch “purely as a memento” (Salinger 100), yet to her, it means much more than that. We soon come to realize that looking deeper into the meaning of the watch, the reality is that the proportion of the oversized face of the watch, compared to her wrist is actually a symbol of the proportion of emotions she is hiding, compared to what she is actually capable of dealing with. She is an extremely young and naïve girl who is carrying around the death of her parents as well as having to hid emotions for the sake of her younger brother. The watch is proportionally way to large for her tiny little wrist. In comparison, the amount of hardship and flood of emotions for a parent’s love and compassion are way to large for such a young, adolescent girl, who has the task to take care of her brother. This watch is not just a memento, yet a memory of her father and the man he was; the person who she needs to be for her
Alice Walker calls Amy Tan's novel, The Joy Luck Club, "honest, moving, and beautifully courageous." Publisher's Weekly describes the novel as "intensely poetic, startlingly imaginative and moving ... deceptively simple yet inherently dramatic." Not only has Amy Tan's fiction been praised for its literary merit, but it also has been included in anthologies of multicultural literature for its portrayal of Chinese and Chinese-American culture.
In the books Year of the Elephant by Leila Abouzeid and The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan the protagonists, Zahra and Ying-ying St. Clair, share a similar struggle. They both suffer from a loss brought about by their husbands that causes them emotional distress, and due to male superiority in patriarchal societies the men are able to alter the lives of their wives without any consequences or feelings of guilt for their wrong doing. However, having experienced the same struggle the women cope with it differently. While Ying-ying decides to tell her daughter Lena about her first marriage in order to give Lena her Tiger spirit, Zahra begins to piece together the life that is now her reality.
In Jackson’s piece of writing, she started off the use of irony through the title itself, “The
The short story ‘The Lottery” written by Shirley Jackson, is honestly a very confusing twisted story about a small peaceful farming community you think at first, but that’s not the case we soon find out. Jackson does a great job showing the reader the dark side of irony in “the lottery” she does this by giving examples of Exposition, foreshadowing, tone and irony its self. Jackson begins the story by explaining the setting. That is done by telling where the story takes place and what season it takes place in, along with the time of day. “THE MORNING OF JUNE 27TH was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green” (624) Second example from Steve Dimeo “Introduce a setting, but with a twist in the hands of a skilled writer (not Snoopy!) who knows what she's doing, opening with a description can lull a reader into a complacency that can make the shock to come even more startling. Shirley Jackson does this in "The Lottery,' her still often-anthologized short story first published in The Men; Yorker in 1948” (Diemo) These two
In Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery” suggest that the lottery is not a lottery that most people think of but a lottery that consists of losing a life. Jackson supports her claims by the use of irony, symbolism, and foreshadowing to depict the impact of following tradition. The author’s purpose is to point out that tradition is not always a good thing in order to do that Jackson end the story with something as horrible as death. The author writes in an ironic tone to suggest that people follow traditions that maybe not acceptable to society.
Mother-Daughter Relationships in Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club In the Joy Luck Club, the author Amy Tan, focuses on mother-daughter relationships. She examines the lives of four women who emigrated from China, and the lives of four of their American-born daughters. The mothers: Suyuan Woo, An-Mei Hsu, Lindo Jong, and Ying-Ying St. Clair had all experienced some life-changing horror before coming to America, and this has forever tainted their perspective on how they want their children raised.