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Literary elements used in Jamaica Kincaid's "The Girl
Literary elements used in Jamaica Kincaid's "The Girl
In what jamaica kincaid focuses on in her essay
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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. The detail given in the passage helps the reader see and understand the character. To describe her appearance, she says, “the way I knew my skin was the color of a nut rubbed repeatedly with a soft cloth”(32-33). The audience now knows she is an African American. Race plays a big role in identity, giving people culture, history, and pride. Due to the fact she has just moved, her new environment holds a different culture that she must find where she fits in. While dressing, she puts on “a gay dress made out of madras cloth”(24) the same …show more content…
kind she would wear if “at home and setting out for a day in the country“(25-26). Yet, she then says, ”It was all wrong”(27). She is preparing for a day in her old world, and not embracing her future. Even her clothes do not fit in the new place, symbolizing her struggle to find her place. The metaphors given in the passage give a picture to show the characters difficulty in transitioning due to her expectation and reality.
When she imagined leaving her old home, she expected it could be the same as leaving behind “an old garment never to be warn again”(67-68). Leaving behind something warn out and old would be easy, but the reality of leaving her home was difficult. Leaving behind an old garment also means it will eventually be replaced, and while her new home has many choices she has never been given before, they are too overwhelming, and she just wants the familiarity she could count on. She also describes her future as, “an overcast seascape on which rain was falling and no boats were in sight”(42-43). This alarming and scary situation describes how she feels. She cannot count on boats to save her, which could be her family and friends in her old home, and the rain could be all of the new
changes. The tone in the passage is somber, and wistful. After describing the sun, she says, “I felt cold inside and out”(46-47). Her comfortable past keeps her from fully experiencing and enjoying her new future. She does not view the new changes as positives, and becomes melancholy. She says she, “longed to be back in the place I came from”(60-61). In such a simple statement, she exposes her fear and sadness, and insecurity of where she belongs in her new world. The narrator’s new life challenges her sense of self by presenting change. She was sure of herself in her old home, and now she did not know where she stood. The change in her environment challenges her to decide on a new blank slate if she will stay stuck in the past or embrace her future.
“The Charmer” by Budge Wilson is a short story about a Canadian family that finds misfortune and conflict within their lives. Conflict being the predominant theme which directly affects all the participants in the family. The story is written in third person and narrated from the young girl Winifred’s point of view. Budge Wilson uses Zack’s smothered childhood, charming personality and irresponsible behaviour to create emotional conflict between members of the family.
Guy de Maupassant’s Mathilde Loisel and Eugenia Collier’s Lizabeth are two characters enduring what they perceive to be an abject state of existence. In Maupassant’s narrative, “The Necklace,” Loisel longs for material things she cannot have. In a similar way, Lizabeth, the protagonist of Eugenia Collier’s “Marigolds,” perceives her own life in the shantytowns of Maryland as dreary and dull. Despite their different character traits and backgrounds, Collier’s and Maupassant’s characters have similarly negative perspectives towards their own lives that greatly influence their actions and consequently, the outcome of the story.
The short story, What I Have Been Doing Lately by Jamaica Kincaid, in my perspective was a representation of two cultures. This story focuses on the two cultures that Jamaica Kincaid came from and also the change in location. What I Have Been Doing Lately, I believe, is a story about how Jamaica feels about the change of scenery when she moves from Antigua to Vermont. The story talks about how the cultures are different but it also captures what it feels like to be homesick.
"My Children are black. They don't look like your children. They know that they are black, and we want it recognized. It's a positive difference, an interesting difference, and a comfortable natural difference. At least it could be so, if you teachers learned to value difference more. What you value, you talk about.'" p.12
The short story girl by Jamaica Kincaid and the short story lust by Susan Minot are both very similar and very different stories. Both stories have themes that are similar to each other because they both talk about a teenager who is about to start adulthood and it talks about how they deal with growing up. Another Theme that the two stories share is how a women should treat men and how women should make others view themselves.
Ten year old Annie John who grew up and lived in Antigua, goes on an internal journey to develop from a little naive girl to a women overcoming various obstacles. She tries being more comfortable with her mother and creating a closer bond despite the big age gap between her and her mother. The story she wrote and presented in class about her mother swimming and drawing patterns on a rock far from the shore. The story shows a common aspect of childhood; the parents are greatly relied on. The day will come when the mother has to leave with all of her teaching and the child has to face reality. Annie’s sentiment changes as she grows up and develops into an independent woman. The novel reflects this change through symbolism representing Annie’s development from a child to an independent woman.
Jamaica Kincaid’s success as a writer was not easily attained as she endured struggles of having to often sleep on the floor of her apartment because she could not afford to buy a bed. She described herself as being a struggling writer, who did not know how to write, but sheer determination and a fortunate encounter with the editor of The New Yorker, William Shawn who set the epitome for her writing success. Ms. Kincaid was a West-Indian American writer who was the first writer and the first individual from her island of Antigua to achieve this goal. Her genre of work includes novelists, essayist, and a gardener. Her writing style has been described as having dreamlike repetition, emotional truth and autobiographical underpinnings (Tahree, 2013). Oftentimes her work have been criticized for its anger and simplicity and praised for its keen observation of character, wit and lyrical quality. But according to Ms. Kincaid her writing, which are mostly autobiographical, was an act of saving her life by being able to express herself in words. She used her life experiences and placed them on paper as a way to make sense of her past. Her experience of growing up in a strict single-parent West-Indian home was the motivation for many of her writings. The knowledge we garnered at an early age influenced the choice we make throughout our life and this is no more evident than in the writings of Jamaica Kincaid.
During the short story ‘The shining houses”, the author Alice Munro goes through a great extent in describing the protagonist Mary Lou Ross through her conflict between choosing to conform or pursing her personal desire. A personal desire is a feeling of wanting something strongly, and trying to achieve it in any way possible. The short story shows the idea of going through changes and conflicts that every human must face during their time on earth. This story expresses the actions of change during Mary’s life, and her having to choose between what will help her town flourish or what is right. Mary, in the short story “The shining houses”, suggests through the main character that if a person does not follow their own path and ideas in life they will never grow and change. Mary will only find happiness and fulfilment in her life is she chooses to follow her judgments based on situations.
She uses imagery to juxtapose her conflicting viewpoints about her home and her current life as described as, “mango trees fruited in the rough asphalt of upper Broadway” (6). This is used as a paradox to fully understand how she carries on her home in India to her home in Manhattan.
Under the orders of her husband, the narrator is moved to a house far from society in the country, where she is locked into an upstairs room. This environment serves not as an inspiration for mental health, but as an element of repression. The locked door and barred windows serve to physically restrain her: “the windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls.” The narrator is affected not only by the physical restraints but also by being exposed to the room’s yellow wallpaper which is dreadful and fosters only negative creativity. “It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide – plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.”
A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid presents the hypothetical story of a tourist visiting Antigua, the author’s hometown. Kincaid places the reader in the shoes of the tourist, and tells the tourist what he/she would see through his/her travels on the island. She paints a picturesque scene of the tourist’s view of Antigua, but stains the image with details of issues that most tourists overlook: the bad roads, the origin of the so-called native food, the inefficiency of the plumbing systems in resorts, and the glitches in the health care system. Kincaid was an established writer for The New Yorker when she wrote this book, and it can be safely assumed that majority of her readers had, at some point in their lives, been tourists. I have been a tourist so many times before and yet, I had never stopped to consider what happens behind the surface of the countries I visit until I read this essay. Kincaid aims to provoke her readers; her style of writing supports her goal and sets both her and her essay apart. To the reader, it sounds like Kincaid is attacking the beautiful island, pin-pointing the very things that we, as tourists, wish to ignore. No tourist wants to think about faeces from the several tourists in the hotel swimming alongside them in the oceans, nor do they want to think about having accidents and having to deal with the hospital. It seems so natural that a tourist would not consider these, and that is exactly what Kincaid has a problem with.
population is oppressed and must ignore or postpone their dreams. The more dreams are postponed
“Miss Brill” by Katherine Mansfield tells a story of a lonely, English lady in France. Miss Brill is a quiet person who believes herself to be important. The whole afternoon at the gardens, Miss Brill does not converse with anyone, nor does anyone show any inclination to talk with her. She merely watches others and listens to their conversations. This provides her with a sense of companionship; she feels as if she is a part of other people’s lives. Miss Brill is also slightly self-conceited. She believes that she is so important that people would notice if she ever missed a Sunday at the park. It does not occur to her that other people may not want her to be there.
The novel, Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other (2011) written by Sherry Turkle, presents many controversial views, and demonstrating numerous examples of how technology is replacing complex pieces and relationships in our life. The book is slightly divided into two parts with the first focused on social robots and their relationships with people. The second half is much different, focusing on the online world and it’s presence in society. Overall, Turkle makes many personally agreeable and disagreeable points in the book that bring it together as a whole.
In Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie attempts to use history in order to gain leverage on the present, to subvert the single story stereotypes that dominate many contemporary discourses on Africa. Written in the genre of historical fiction, Adichie’s novel transcends beyond mere historical narration and recreates the polyphonic experiences of varying groups of people in Nigeria before and after the Civil War. She employs temporal distortion in her narrative, distorting time in order to illustrate the intertwining effects of the past and present, immersing deep into the impact of western domination that not only catalyzed the war, but continues to affect contemporary Africa. In this paper, I will analyze her portrayal of the multifaceted culture produced by colonialism – one that coalesces elements from traditional African culture with notions of western modernity to varying degrees. I will argue that Adichie uses a range of characters, including Odenigbo’s mother, Ugwu, Olanna and Kainene, to each represent a point in a spectrum between tradition and modernity. Through her juxtaposition, she undermines the stereotypes that continue to characterize Africa as backwards and traditional, proving instead that colonialism has produced a cross culture where the two are intertwined.