Commentary on Feet

Analysis on Feet Feet is a prose talking about a little child looking at his sister’s death. The story is set in a post war period, when poverty and diseases are everywhere. We can know this by looking at the date written under the title, “September 1948”. The story happened in a working class family in Ireland. We can know that it is set in Ireland from the little sister’s name. From the sentence in line 7, “ Una. My younger sister, Una.” We know that her name is Una, which is an Irish name, so we can know that it is an Irish family. It is showed that the family is in working class by looking at the descriptions of the uncles’ work and the mother’s feet. In paragraph 4, it mentioned that the uncles are working in a building site as workers. While in paragraph 5, it mentioned that the mother is wearing low heels and her feet are swollen, which shows that even the mother have been working. This prose is set under a table. It can be seen in line 5, “Smoky had found me under the table”, that the child is under the table. In the story, the child is the main character. The child is in denial of his sister’s death. We can see this from his action and his mind. First, we know that he is hiding himself under the table, this shows that he doesn’t want to face this tragedy. Secondly, in paragraph 4, we can see the child’s flashback of his past life with the uncles. This showed that he is trying to think of other things so not to remind himself of his sister’s death, which is an action of evading. Last but not least, in the ending paragraph, the sentence “Smoky shook under his fur and whimpered when I pushed him away” showed that the child is suppressing and denying his emotions. We can also see that the child is bewildered as he only has partial understandings. We can know this simply by looking from the angle of the child, all he can see under the table are feet only. Also, in the last paragraph, the child asked quite a lot of rhetorical questions which showed his