Reading 3: Alice Walker and Jamaice Kincaid

Authors Note: I accidentally posted without actually type anything. Here is the fix.

"The Flowers" By Alice Walker:

This is the short story about a girl named Myop. She likely lives at a farm due to her ability to have "worked out the beat of a song on the fence around the pigpen". Her family is a sharecropper family, which means a tenant (the family) is allowed to farm land so long as the share a portion of the crops with the owner of the land. She walks throw the wilderness beyond the property to pick flowers. As she makes her way back to the house she finds the dead body of a tall, hanged man on the ground with his head separated. Near the body a wild pink rose grows in a raised ring mound (the noose) and the rest of the rope hanging from the tree.

Repetition is found throughout this story, whether its in the structure, like "the corn and cotton, peanuts and squash" or in the way Walker starts her sentences, as in the second paragraph. In paragraph 2, She or the antecedent Myop start every sentence followed directly by a verb. Alliteration was very popular in the piece as well (repetition of the starting consonants) such as "sweet suds", "brown ... buds", "big bones", "raised .. ring...rose's root...rotted remains" and "blending benignly". She finished off the last paragraph with four participles (verbs ending in -ed used as noun modifiers).

The amount of repition in the last paragraph show the significance Walker places on it. The last paragraph is really the climax and conclusion of the story. The seven previous paragraph set up the setting, character development, and action so that the climax and conclusion could happen so quickly. She finds a dead body of a man while picking flowers with a beautiful flower beside. However, she places the rose back down upon discovery of its location (within a noose). Possibly a sign of reverence toward the dead man or a fear of him. The negative participles used to describe the rope still attached to the tree adds to the haunting emotions.

In paragraph five she uses an odd word choice: "strangeness of the land made it not as pleasant as her usual haunts." Haunt simply means a place commonly visited but is usually associated with ghosts. The odd choice is where strangeness is associated oppositely with haunts, as if possibly ghosts were a familiarity.