The Gift Of Sweat Analysis

The Hidden Meaning Behind “The Gift of Sweat”

The Gift of Sweat” by Rebecca Brown, tells the story of a man with a mysterious disease. The story is told from what we presume is one of the man’s friends. We read about her routine with Rick, the man that is ill, and his happenings. This story is intriguing because it is very poignant and mysterious. This makes us wonder about this character's lives and why the outcome of the story is what it ended up to be.. What makes this story so pleasurable is the writing style. The way the author made us predict what Rick’s illness was, made the story that much more interesting. The way Brown played with context clues made the readers interested, it made the readers want more and figure out more about the characters, and the story itself.

The Author has a great usage of context clues.

Brown never approached any of the problems in the story directly. She gives you indications and actions within the story that make you ponder about what it’s happening in the story,besides the main plot that we are reading. One example is, the author doesn’t directly say that Rick is a homosexual.This quote from the story lets us infer this,“Every Saturday night he and Barry would watch a movie on the VCR in the living room. They’ll pull the futon out like a bed and watch it from there and pretend they were at a bed-and-breakfast on vacation.” This passage from the story tells us that Rick could be a homosexual, but it is not clearly expressed. When you read about what Rick and Barry are doing, t pictures them as a normal couple hanging out on a weekend. We can assume that Rick was in a relationship with Barry. The reader can come to a deduction and therefore they want to keep reading to solve more of the mysteries intertwine in this

story.
We are not told what Rick’s illness is but we can speculate by the concealed clues and the messages the author gives us. We aren’t told who Barry is directly either, but we know that he is deceased and that he was someone very important to Rick. We know he was a crucial part of Rick’s life because when Barry was sick, Rick spent his time taking care of him until he died. We can presume that Barry had AIDS and when he died, Rick contracted the disease as well. The way the Characters develop without the readers knowing their background or their personality, just figuring out what kind of person the character is, makes the reader contemplate more about the characters. When The narrator says, “ I started cleaning. I usually started in the kitchen, but as soon as I set foot in there and saw the kitchen table I couldn’t.” This simple sentence, we know that she is very caring and wants to help Rick by cleaning his house, but yet she feels she can’t because she is too troubled with Rick's condition.
“The Gift of Sweat” is a very intriguing story with great utilization of context clues. The way the author subtly hinted at Rick’s sexual orientation and the relationships each character had with each other made this story enjoyable and made the reader think about it and not just read and go along with the story. You had to make some assumptions about why something was happening like, why Rick was ill or why is the narrator always with him and trying to help him do daily things like cleaning. This is just a story one wished had gone deeper into the character’s lives. Context clues give the reader more to the story than there is already. You could say it’s a story within a story, we don’t just learn about the narrator's relationship with Rick but we also learn about Rick himself and why he ended up so ill and fragile.