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Everyday Use By Alice Walker

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In Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use,” this story describes what a continuing theme in her writings is: the depiction of constant harmony and inner struggles and conflicts that the minority culture goes through especially the African-American society. In Alice Walker Short Story “Everyday Use” it centers on the relationships between a lower class family by the name of Johnson in a small poor rural community. This meeting takes place when the oldest daughter Dee comes home to visit her mother and sister, Maggie with her paramour. Dee being the oldest is the only person in her family to go off to college and see the world. The encounter between the sisters is basically a meeting among two diverse analyses of the African-American society. Alice Walker engages the symbolism and characterization to point out the changes among these analyses and eventually to support one by displaying that heritage and culture is part of one’s daily life. In the beginning of the reading it deals with characterizing the mother and the narrator of the story. More precisely, the mother’s language pinpoints to a relationship amongst herself and her surroundings: as she patiently waits for her oldest daughter Dee “in the yard that Maggie and I made so clean and wavy” (88). The importance on the characteristics of the yard, the desire in it displayed by the word “so,” pinpoints to the connection that she and her youngest daughter have to their home and to the daily repetition in their

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