Summary: The Country Of The Pointed Firs

Prompt: Read the prose excerpt from Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs. Then write a well-organized essay in which you explain how the passage characterizes the narrator. Discuss how Jewett uses literary elements and devices to convey meaning.

The narrator in Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs is a bit of a mystery, but an interesting one nonetheless. Though the passage speaks mostly about village life, we can see hints of who is speaking to the reader. In doing this, Jewett allows the reader to focus more on the other characters, and Dunnet. However, by carefully examining the literary elements, we can find how the speaker is characterized. In the second paragraph, we are given our first look into who the speaker is: “...a lover of Dunnet Landing returned to find the unchanged shores of the pointed firs, the same quaintness of the village with its elaborate conventionalities; all that mixture of remoteness, and childish certainty of being the centre of civilization of which her affectionate dreams had told…” With this, we find out that the narrator was native to Dunnet Landing, perhaps as a young girl, and that she is still fond of the “...shores of the pointed firs...”. The diction surrounding the narrator’s fondness gives the story a bit of warmth
Todd. “This cooling and refreshing drink had been brought to wonderful perfection through a long series of experiments; it had won immense local fame.... For various reasons, the seclusion and uninterrupted days which had been looked forward to proved to be very rare in this otherwise delightful corner of the world”. While the narrator looked to find peace and “uninterrupted days” in Dunnet, she finds instead the hustle of village life, especially when Mrs. Todd makes her famous beer. Despite it being busy, the narrator still clearly enjoys being in