The Author's Personal Experience: Bonnie Jo Campbell's Sleep Over

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Sleep-over by Bonnie Jo Campbell is more than the usual teenager maturity story; between the lines, and behind the symbolism there is an underlying meaning. I believe the author is speaking from experience when telling this story. This story may be the authors depiction of the event of how she remembers it. From the title to the last sentence, Campbell expresses literary devices, natural languages, and involves her personal life into the story making it more than a teenage tale.
Bonnie Jo Campbell titled the short story with a hyphen in the word, Sleep-over. This was the first use of literary devices, foreshadowing. Normally the word is spelled without the use of a hyphen. By definition, hyphens are used to connect, or separate words. In this case, I believe Campbell used the conjoined meaning of the hyphen. The conjoining of the words, sleep and over, signifying that no sleep will be done, which supported by the text when pammy falls asleep, but the narrator is still awake. Campbell uses the literary device of symbolism plenty in this story. In writing authors use symbols for meaning, but also for emotions in the topic(Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia). Vanity, can be shown in this text, as in most, by comparing oneself to another character in terms of beauty (Greenfield Web). In Sleep-over the narrator compares her chest to that of Pammy’s being that hers is smaller. The author starts her symbolism with this comparison, and moves on to the parts of the body. She lists in order: mouth, throat, collarbone, pelvis, and tongue. The mouth and throat are used for the fundamentals of interaction of other beings. Bone in general often signifies eternity because they are the last part of the human body after death. As for the tongue...

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.... Web. http://web.b.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=2e36cbfd-f496-4ee5-be9a-8b953318bd82%40sessionmgr198&vid=2&hid=128 Portas, Allison. "Dictionary of Symbolism." Ed. Eric Jaffe. University of Michigan: Fantasy and
Science Fiction. Webcrawler, 1997. Web. 19 Feb. 2014. http://www.umich.edu/~umfandsf/symbolismproject/symbolism.html/index.html Simley, Jane. "Bonnie Jo Campbell's Rural Michigan Gothic." Sunday Book Review. The New York Times Co., 22 July 2011. Web. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/books/review/once-upon-a-river-by-bonnie-jo-campbell-book-review.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1& "Symbol." Columbia Electriconic Encyclopedia, 6th Edition. (2013): 1. Literary Reference Center. Web.
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