Sandpiper: Culture and Husband
Sandpiper
How does the author use literary techniques to enhance her theme in the story 'Sandpiper'?
“Sandpiper” by Ahdaf Soueif is a story about the narrator, who is a European woman that is recollecting her relationship with her husband and family, which shows the reader her feelings and how the husband has affected her life. The antagonist is the speaker itself as she experiences an internal conflict with herself. The writer uses literary techniques such as metaphor, personification, imagery, repetition, juxtapose and rhetorical questions to help enhance the main theme in the story, which is cultural difference. The author also describes her relationship with her husband to reveal how they drifted apart from each other and his influence on her.
The author describes the beach and sea in the beginning of the story and portrays the movement of the waves as a metaphor for the speaker’s relationship. The author uses the speaker’s actions and descriptions to reveal her personality, which is passiveness. We realize this through the line, “I did not want one grain of sand, blown by a breeze I could not feel, to change it course because of me.” This tells us that she didn’t take control of her own life and allowed things to remain unchanged, whether she liked them that way or not. The author writes in first person narrative giving the reader a direct view of the character’s feelings. The story moves between past and present along with the emotions of the speaker. The tone of the story seems to be melancholic as it shows us the speaker’s sense of aching and dejection.
As the story moves on, the speaker describes her marriage with her husband and her lifestyle in her new home in Egypt. The reader notices a repetition of the phrase, “I should have gone”. This displays the speaker’s sense of guilt and passiveness as the “serrating thought” of leaving constantly cut into her because she felt her husband “pulling away from” her. Color imagery is used to describe a
How does the author use literary techniques to enhance her theme in the story 'Sandpiper'?
“Sandpiper” by Ahdaf Soueif is a story about the narrator, who is a European woman that is recollecting her relationship with her husband and family, which shows the reader her feelings and how the husband has affected her life. The antagonist is the speaker itself as she experiences an internal conflict with herself. The writer uses literary techniques such as metaphor, personification, imagery, repetition, juxtapose and rhetorical questions to help enhance the main theme in the story, which is cultural difference. The author also describes her relationship with her husband to reveal how they drifted apart from each other and his influence on her.
The author describes the beach and sea in the beginning of the story and portrays the movement of the waves as a metaphor for the speaker’s relationship. The author uses the speaker’s actions and descriptions to reveal her personality, which is passiveness. We realize this through the line, “I did not want one grain of sand, blown by a breeze I could not feel, to change it course because of me.” This tells us that she didn’t take control of her own life and allowed things to remain unchanged, whether she liked them that way or not. The author writes in first person narrative giving the reader a direct view of the character’s feelings. The story moves between past and present along with the emotions of the speaker. The tone of the story seems to be melancholic as it shows us the speaker’s sense of aching and dejection.
As the story moves on, the speaker describes her marriage with her husband and her lifestyle in her new home in Egypt. The reader notices a repetition of the phrase, “I should have gone”. This displays the speaker’s sense of guilt and passiveness as the “serrating thought” of leaving constantly cut into her because she felt her husband “pulling away from” her. Color imagery is used to describe a