Friend Of My Youth : Conflicting Perspectives Between Relationships

The friends of the narrator, however, do not hide in the imaginary world of childhood and are maturing into adolescents. Sally, “ screamed if she got her stockings muddy,” felt they were too old to “ the games” (paragraph 9). Sally stayed by the curb and talked to the boys (paragraph 10).

When writing a story, authors have to worry about ways to add tension to the conflict. To add to this aspect of a story, authors can make a twist in the plot, use more sensory detail, or introduce new characters. In Diana Lopez’s realistic fiction, “Confetti Girl,” and Jennifer Cervantes’s, “Tortilla Sun,” both the narrators have different perspectives from their parents. In the stories,”Confetti Girl,” and ,”Tortilla Sun,” the fact that the narrators have different perspectives from their parents adds tension to the conflicts by having characters disagree on a certain topic.

Memory is used as a powerful conduit into the past; childhood experiences held in the subconscious illuminate an adult’s perception. Harwood uses tense shifts throughout her poetry to emphasise and indicate the interweaving and connection the past and the present hold. By allowing this examination of the childhood memories, Harwood identifies that their significance is that of an everlasting memory that will dominate over time’s continuity and the inevitability of death.

Sethe’s language is also used to express the emotional effects of her daughter’s death and troubled past. Instead of using the words "remember" and "forget," Sethe uses the words "rememory" (both a noun and a verb here) and

The other reading of the story might be based on the maturing of a young woman. As it is probably the most important period in every adolescent's life, when they keep searching for their own identity, it should by strongly influenced by their parents. If it is not, a teenager starts looking for directions outside their home, and sometimes has difficulties with distinguishing what is good and evil. They are very often affected by

Language and imagery plays a dramatic role in portraying relationships and feelings/thoughts of the persona. Whilst in ‘Burning Sappho,’ the mother’s attitude towards tasks is portrayed as emotionless (“the child is fed, the dishes are washed, the clothes are ironed and aired,”), language is utilised within ‘Suburban Sonnet’ to construct the mother’s mental state and situation as dire. “Zest and Love drain out with soapy water.” The use of two personal, passionate adjectives and the depiction of them being physically overcome by soapy water directly link the mother’s loss of feelings and fiery emotion to the household chores and duties. For example, she “scours crusted milk,” as a part of her role as mother and housewife as the reader is positioned to reject this requirement as a result of the huge impact to her quality of life (“Veins ache”). The literal image of a dead mouse symbolises the mother’s situation as the ‘soft corpse’ directly represents the mother, that is, emotionally dead as a result of the entrapment by society. The reader is positioned to fully

Susan Griffin, a feminist writer and finalist for the Pulitzer Price in non-fiction, explores the concept of forgetting in her chapter “Our Secret”. Unlike Foer, Griffin (1992) doesn’t seem to be too much a fan of remembering, describing memory to be like “a long, half-lit tunnel, a tunnel where one is likely to encounter phantoms of a self, long concealed, no longer nourished with the force of consciousness, existing in a tortured state between life and death” (p. 258). In fact, Griffin might argue that there are several benefits to forgetting, and that the collective memories of a traumatic past should not be remembered or preserved. Failure to retrieve memories may not always be a bad thing, in fact, unwanted memories – of childhood trauma, emotional rejection, or any of life’s inevitable disappointments - have the ability to torment and mentally exhaust a person. Throughout her essay, Griffin explores the hidden shame and pains that several characters carry, herself included, and the consequences they bring. She writes of one woman’s memories of the cold war, who, as a young child, witnessed “shoes in great piles. Bones. Women’s hair, clothes, stains, a terrible odor”, all of which left her sobbing and screaming in fear (Griffin, 1992, p. 233). Another gruesome account Griffin (1992) writes of, is as

Both texts and their authors talk about the memories assiciated with the objects that they had or meaned something to them. One of the examples of an object's memory was, "a piano brought down from syracuse, the one my mother played as a girl. This shows how the narrator associates the piano with the memory of their mother playing it as a child. An example of a memeory from passage 2 is, "tin box, oh how you remind me of the swell of other seas, the roar of

  Memories are works of fiction, selective representations of experiences actual or imagined. They provide a framework for creating meaning in one's own life as well as in the lives of others. In Toni Morrison's novel Beloved, memory is a dangerous and debilitating faculty of human consciousness. Sethe endures the tyranny of the self imposed prison of memory. She expresses an insatiable obsession with her memories, with the past. Sethe is compelled to explore and explain an overwhelming sense of yearning, longing, thirst for something beyond herself, her daughter, her Beloved. Though Beloved becomes a physical manifestation of these memories, her will is essentially defined by and tied to the

Through the mother, we see that dreaming may lead to a painful disappointment. The mother has an unrealistic image of her and her future husband as an idyllic, respectable and happy couple, which is not true in reality. “… avoiding the riotous amusements being beneath the dignity of so dignified couple”. She is trying to make an image of herself as an intelligent, domestic and interesting woman, which shows

Josie's perspective of her grandmother changes from viewing her as nagging old women to having a loving, caring, respectful relationship with her. The narrative, which is written in first person, enables the reader to see the stages in which her perspective changes as she gains knowledge about her grandmother and also how it is her own actions that

Blin’s work throughout this article does not just develop into discussing the short story itself, but mainly focuses on the notation of the authors writing. This article, “Alice Munro’s naughty coordinators in Friend of My Youth” by Lynn Blin is an interesting read; by being able to use this article as a template for any other piece of writing while still being very useful and specific towards “Friend of My Youth”. She breaks down the sentences and words to understand the deeper workings of “Friend of My Youth”. Blin points out that Munro purposely leaves important information out of her story, leaving the narrator and the reader in the dark. “It is in… gaps that Munro not only enables us to play our role of active readers by inviting us to fill them in, it is in these gaps she constructs the space in her text to enable various narrative voices to be heard” (paragraph 71). By identifying those blanks the reader can come up with assumptions of what is really happening and thus can come up with a variety of outcomes.

The storyteller is able to keep his or her memories fresh and alive through the act of telling stories. At the age of forty-three, Tim O’Brien is still able to remember his childhood friend, Linda, who died when he was nine. “Even now I can see her walking down the aisle of the old State Theater in Worthington, Minnesota. I can see her face in profile beside me, the cheeks softly lighted by coming attractions.” Linda is given the gift of life through death by the power of the story. She not only lives in the mind of Tim O’Brien, but now Linda can live in the mind of anyone of whom he tells the story to. O’Brien’s audience is even graced with the pleasure of imagining what Linda looked like, “There were little crinkles at her eyes, her lips open and gently curving at the corners.” The audience can nearly see Linda, nine years old, standing in a childlike manner before

In “Friend of My Youth” it is told from the Narrator's mother's point of view who became very fond of her teaching friend as a young woman who was a hell-bent Cameronian. Which is meaning they “forbid engines or electricity or any inventions of that sort” (Munro 152). In this story there are many alternative endings which not all of the ending are what the author intended. Maybe she did not want Robert, or she was secretly insane. Additionally, it could be that Robert was not the one for her. In the short story told, Flora is a timid saint of a woman, her story ends with being stable and healthy but her world is not what it seems when she faces the crippling loss of her lover, the loss of her sister, and the loss of her home.

Linda Pastan made this poem include various forms of figurative language to hide the literal message that it's trying to portray. Figurative language is using figures of speech to make the text be more powerful, persuasive, and meaningful. Figures of speech such as, similes and metaphors, go beyond the literal meanings to give the readers a new way of looking at the text. It can come in multiple ways with different literacy and rhetorical devices such as: alliteration, imageries, onomatopoeias, and etc. With the usage of the literary devices Pastan has used, it introduced the relationship between the mother and the daughter. It shows the memories of how the mother helped her daughter grow from a little girl to a young adult getting ready to go her own way in life.