Summary Of When The Emperor Was Divine By Julie Otsuka

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How Symbolism Can Illustrate and Add Depth to Unconventional Things The loss of innocence may happen slowly or suddenly and is always unpredictable. Innocence is a quality people are born with, but most often do not die with. In When the Emperor was Divine, the characters are sent to an isolated camp for Japanese Americans where they experience a decline within themselves as their situation gets worse. The author, Julie Otsuka, creates symbolism through the color white to show the slow deterioration of the characters and their circumstances, demonstrating that when people are subject to negative change and thrust into difficult situations, the loss of purity and innocence is inevitable. When people are forced to change for the worse, their circumstances are …show more content…

The tainting of impurity is never actually gone, no matter how hard a person may try to cover it. When the father returns from prison, he is a different person to them. He is a shell of who he once was, and the purity of what was once there has seemingly disappeared. “He wore bright white dentures, and he’d lost the last of his hair,” (Otsuka 132). Dentures are used when teeth fall out or are missing. The significance of them being replaced with white dentures is to demonstrate that after the camps and prison, when everyone is trying to get back to how their lives were before and act like the loss of innocence had never happened, something is missing just like the teeth. No matter if they have the fake white teeth or the fake purity that the horrible conditions of the prisons and treatment of Japanese Americans have taken from them, if you remove them, the original teeth and purity are still missing. The environments that the mother and father have been put into influence the people's innocence, and no matter how hard they try to resist it or cover it up, it is still

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