9/17/13
Killing Chickens This is an excerpt of the book Without a Map by Meredith Hall, In the chapter Killing
Chickens, the protagonist is narrating her thirtyeighth birthday. She starts off describing how she's struggling with killing a chicken, then we find out it's her birthday. Earlier that morning she broke the news to her children that their father and her are getting a divorce. Her thesis was hard to find because it wasn’t like a summery in the beginning of an essay. It was more deep, it was hidden well within the comparison of killing chickens, and her divorce.
Meredith Hall showed us her thesis instead of telling us it by describing every minutiae in dealing with her divorce and killing chickens. She didn’t directly tell us her thesis, she made us look for it. instead of one sentence summing up everything her essay will talk about she described how it was for her to kill the chickens, then how she’s dealing with her children who just got the news that morning. I felt the thesis could be interpreted within the third paragraph, on the second page, it says, “Two down. I feel powerful, capable. I can handle whatever comes to me”. The first sentence directly pertains to her killing the chickens, but indirectly the paragraph is referring to all the things she's going to do now that her husband will not be there. she previously depended on him to do things like killing the chickens, and probably many more chores but now that she did killed a chicken, instead of having her husband do it, she feels capable of moving on, it was her first step towards her life as powerful, self sufficient, independent, strong woman.