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Balzac And The Little Chinese Seamstress

Decent Essays

With two completely different settings and backgrounds, most people wouldn’t associate the book Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie and the short story “A Walk to the Jetty” by Jamaica Kincaid. But one aspect of their way of writing ties there styles together, which is the way they use their minor characters. Dai Sijie and Jamaica Kincaid use minor characters to help develop the major characters by teaching them important life lessons. The authors use the minor characters such as Luo from Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress and Annie’s parents, especially her mum, from “A Walk to the Jetty” to introduce new perspectives to the major characters which in turn changes the main characters’ attitudes and decisions.

In Balzac …show more content…

He makes it very clear that without an improvement to the Little Seamstress’s countryside personality and level of knowledge, he would not be interested in her when he said “She’s not civilised, at least not enough for me!” (Sijie p.27). Ironically, Luo then goes on to have a serious mature relationship with the Little Seamstress despite no evident development to her civilization, but reconnects with his former claim when he realizes he can use the books from Four Eyes to educate the Little Seamstress. The book the narrator and Luo received from Four Eyes was written by a famous French author called Honore de Balzac, and the book was called Ursule Mirouet. Luo felt so touched by Balzac’s words and he felt like he had to share the teachings of Balzac to the Little Seamstress. Luo’s actions do seem selfish, but in contrast to that, from the short story “A Walk to the Jetty”, …show more content…

In Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, there is obviously a change in personality and attitude of the Little Seamstress as she is an uneducated girl from the countryside and she learnt one thing from Balzac which completely changed her view of the way she lives compared to the way she deserves to live. Luo states “She said she learnt one thing from Balzac: that a woman’s beauty is a treasure beyond price” (Sijie p.184). By the way that Luo treated her, and everyone treated her for her beauty, in addition to the one thing she learnt from Balzac, she gets this sense of arrogance that she believes her beauty alone can keep her alive and give her a much better life in the city than what she was living in the countryside, where she was never properly educated to a level where she could read or write. Again, although the two authors use similar techniques to create development in their main characters, the way and purpose they use minor character are completely different. Annie believed that her mum was a hypocrite and that she didn’t really love Annie, just because her mum said she could never live without Annie but she was keep trying to get Annie to go study abroad. This caused some confusion, but later on when Annie had to leave for England and she was

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