After Matilda’s grandfather dies, Anderson uses repetition of the word ‘Dead’. Examples of these times include “Dead? Grandfather couldn’t be dead.” (147), “Dead.” (147), and “Dead. Growing cold.” (148).” By repeating the word dead, the author shows in this scene that Mattie is having to grasp the fact that grandfather is dead. At first denying it, and then accepting that the fact is true. This illustrates that Matilda is having a difficult time saying goodbye, especially since she knows for a fact that she will never see her grandfather alive again. Anderson not only uses repetition, however, and also uses flashback to describe the lingering pain that saying goodbye to someone leaves behind. “...I found myself listening for Polly’s giggle or Grandfather’s voice.” (243). After the Yellow Fever epidemic is over, Mattie is remembers all of the people she lost during it. Including her friend Polly and her grandfather who both died during the difficult time. Because of this remembrance and this flashback to the ones she loves that are now gone, it shows that lingering feeling of pain after saying goodbye to someone. While it could be said that Anderson used both of these crafts in the novel to simply create a mood throughout the book, it is the specific words that…
So it goes. Barbara had this special talent to repel people away. Her biggest worry however had always been her gone-absolutely-bonkers-father. She had taken Billy to an elderly house shortly after he’d decided to write letters about Tralfamadore to the local newspaper. Billy had always lived a life full of indignity and so, perhaps, had no great fear of death.…
detail separated the grandmother from the rest of her family who seemed to be living in a…
Lifted to his feet they started walking away from the crowd. Knowing that he was drowning in his despair he had finally died. He could have just realized that she was dead and deal with it, but instead he decided to ruin his life. He had not seen Bessie this morning walking by the corner, and he did not see her with another man. In his mind he would never see her again, and maybe he would see no one again.…
The first facade that the Grandmother tries to portray of herself is when she expressed how important it was for her to dress up during the road trip so that “anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once she was a lady”, with this statement one can see that the Grandmother is morally and spiritually disconnected. On the way to Florida Grandmother's character slowly unravels as she criticizes the “little packaninny” they saw standing outside with no pants on, stating that the “little niggers in the country don't have things like we do” suggesting that they were better off than most people which is contradictory to what most Christians believe(Bedford/St. Martin's 141). The Grandmother nags her son into taking them to visit an old plantation…
The author expresses the theme by showing how the young teen feels the exact opposite with her grandma to the way she feels around her family. The girl connects with her grandma. The grandma represents great loss. She represents great loss because the grandma was the only person that gave her a sense of hope. The grandma must die so the girl can let go of her resentment and rebirth her new accepting self.…
Lying on her deathbed , she contemplates that “She had spent so much time preparing for death there was no need for bringing it up again”(2). Even when approached with death she felt like she had to be in control of even the littlest thoughts. Her extreme propensity to control presents a psychological dependency; her urge to control may stem from the loss of her loved ones such as her husband John, her fiancé George, and her child Hapsy. The point of view changes occasionally switches to first person to emphasize the focus on Granny Weatherall’s desires and thoughts at specified time; for example in the middle of a description of George’s abandonment the author adds in, “No, I swear he never harmed me but in that.”(3). Because this information is directly from Granny’s perspective, it demonstrates her deepest thoughts: her need to convince herself that she is not hurt by the abandonment. She tries to suppress the unpleasant pain of the sudden abandonment in order to move on. Because she could not control the jilting by her fiancé, she instead tries to control her emotions not allowing herself to be hurt. To compensate for the unexpected…
At the beginning, Gavin Elster met his friend Scottie and asked him to follow his wife. Gavin suggested that maybe his wife being obsessed by the ghost of her grandmother. There were many scenes that Scottie followed Madeleine. The sense of Scottie tailing Madeleine by car through the streets of San Francisco, the car seems to be floating above the pavement. Gradually, with the growth of Scottie’s obsession with Madeleine, Scottie began to suspect that Gavin might have been right. At the same time, he fell in love with Madeleine deeply. Scottie is no longer a logical, detached observer, because he has fallen into a plot and lost himself. The story goes on, Madeleine unexpectedly commits suicide. Scottie’s acrophobia prevented him from saving her; she died by leaping off of a tall bell tower.…
A focus on characters, especially the grandmother gives a theme of grace and self-discovery. Once faced with the misfit and possible death she changes from unreligious to religious trying to bid her survival. And in turn has an insight of herself and the misfit. The theme of self-discovery is shown with the grandmothers change. She isn’t as bad as she may seem, just like the misfit who she at first despises then later relates with.…
One of the first foreshadows is when the grandmother didn't want to leave the cat alone in the house. She said the cat would miss her to much. This foreshadows to the death of the grandmother. One of the other foreshadowing's to the death of the grandmother is when the grandmother points out the graveyard that had five or six graves fenced in. Not only do the graves symbolizes death, the amount of graves there are also match the amount of family members in the car that ended up dying. Another foreshadowing to the grandmothers death is how and why she is so dressed up for the trip. Unlike the mother of the kids the grandmother was dressed in her Sundays best. The grandmother says that she is dressed nicely "in case of an accident anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know she was a lady" (OConnor 309). Another thing that I think is significant in the story is the type car the Misfit drove up to the family in. It was described as "a big black battered hearse-like automobile" (OConnor 314). After reading the outcome of the story you recognize how the car relates. This car represents the coming of their death. O'Connor also hints the upcoming deaths by the name of the town the family was in when the Grandma happened to recall this old memory of the house. The name of the town was Toombsboro and when analyzed, the word "tomb" pulled out of the town's name, foreshadows how the family will meet their…
It is effortlessly watched that the grandma's morals include making her surroundings as charming as her identity. Toward the starting, you can perceive how the grandchildren are making unfriendly remarks towards the grandma about going on the trip with them.As she sits in the back seat arrangement with the hostile kids as opposed to permitting them to demolish her inclination, she chooses to bring up the “ interesting details of the scenery- stone mountain’s; the blue granite, the brilliant red clay banks slightly streaked with purple” Toward the end while a casualty of a killer the grandma still attempted to make some great out of the circumstance. "Ain't a cloud in the sky" he commented. "Yes it is a wonderful day" said the grandma. “Listen you shouldn’t call yourself misfit because I know you’re a good man at heart. I can just look at you and tell.” The grandma said. As expressed before the grandma was devoted to keeping her lesson of making her surroundings as wonderful as her…
One of the literary devices being used in the short story is forshadowing. In the begining of the story, the grandmother was reading a newspaper about the "Misfit" romaing around the cities and she wants her family to go somewhere at Tennesse instead. The forshadowing is that the family's death is in the graveyard when they "passed by a cotton field with five or six graves fenced" (383). This is a coincidence that there a full car of five or six people including the…
The primary theme of the story is that a good person (like Phoenix) will do her duty and fulfill her obligations no matter how hard it is to do so. She really has a hard time getting to town, but she will do it because her grandson needs her – she is all the family he has.…
All the spirituality is all great, but it is almost impossible for the reader to throw away what they already have in their minds concerning the dead bodies. The story is way more than a family being murdered on a vacation trip. Asals states that, “Any full discussion of the story must deal with both the grandmother 's soul and the dead bodies, and indeed with the tension between the two levels implied here, for that tension is at the very heart of the story.” The Misfit, which is the murderer in the story, partakes on the story 's most used passage from Flannery 's fiction:…
This last part of this fragment of the story represents really well the thoughts of the grandmother. The fact of the grandmother dressing to be identified if they have an accident…