John Grisham's A Painted House
John Grisham’s book, ‘A Painted House’ places the reader within the walls of a simple home on the cotton fields of rural Arkansas. Within the first few pages, the author’s description of the setting quickly paints a picture of a hard working family and creates a shared concern with the reader about the family’s struggle to meet the basic needs of life. The description of the dusty roads, the unpainted board-sided house, the daily chore requirements and their lack of excess cause the reader a reaction of empathy for the family. Although the story takes place in a dusty setting very unfamiliar to most readers, the storyline is timeless and universal. Most everyone has a desire to meet the basic
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As one might expect from the title, one continued part of the story concerns the lack of paint on the home. Trot, in spite of his lack of physical strength and intelligence, decides to paint the house. His sister Tally buys him some paint, and Trot begins painting the house on a side not normally visible during daily activities. At first, it seems a mystery on who is painting the house and for what reason. It’s very obvious later in the book what the author was conveying with this exercise. The unpainted house is certainly a metaphor when studying these folk as they interact with one another. One has to set his goals and work very hard and persistently in order to complete the task...just as in life. Mr. Grisham takes the reader into the cotton fields with the snakes, the almost-unbearable heat, and the empty sacks that must be filled. Too much time spent in one area of a cotton row and there is wasted time. Not enough time spent in each area of the cotton row, and there is wasted cotton. The bags have to be filled in order for anyone to get paid. Luke is out there everyday with the adults - dragging his sack behind him while doing his best to keep up with the others. The work is hard and the days are long. However, in this book’s setting, it seems natural and expected for everyone to share the load. Although one’s initial reaction may be that Luke is too young, the point has to be stressed:
The author uses tone and images throughout to compare and contrast the concepts of “black wealth” and a “hard life”. The author combines the use of images with blunt word combinations to make her point; for example, “you always remember things like living in Woodlawn with no inside toilet”. This image evokes the warmth of remembering a special community with the negative, have to use outdoor facilities. Another example of this combination of tone and imagery is “how good the water felt when you got your bath from one of those big tubs that folk in Chicago barbecue in”. Again the author’s positive memory is of feeling fresh after her bath combined with a negative, the fact that it was a barbecue drum.
“Home is where the heart is.” In The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros develops this famous statement to depict what a “home” really represents. What is a home? Is it a house with four walls and a roof, the neighborhood of kids while growing up, or a unique Cleaver household where everything is perfect and no problems arise? According to Cisneros, we all have our own home with which we identify; however, we cannot always go back to the environment we once considered our dwelling place. The home, which is characterized by who we are, and determined by how we view ourselves, is what makes every individual unique. A home is a personality, a depiction of who we are inside and
As a young girl, Esperanza is a young girl who looks at life from experience of living in poverty, where many do not question their experience. She is a shy, but very bright girl. She dreams of the perfect home, with beautiful flowers and a room for everyone. When she moves to the house of Mango Street, reality is so different than the dream. In this story, hope (Esperanza) sustains tragedy. The house she dreamed of was another on. It was one of her own. One where she did not have to share a bedroom with everyone. That included her mother, father and two siblings. The run down tiny house has "bricks crumbling in places". The one she dreamed of had a great big yard, trees and 'grass growing without a fence'. She did not want to abandon
The objects people keep in their homes can tell a story about who they are or were. Each item possessed by the residents of a house is evidence of how these people may have lived. Ted Kooser’s poem “Abandoned Farmhouse” takes the reader on a walkthrough of the remains of a farmhouse where a poor family once lived. In “Abandoned Farmhouse,” Kooser selects seemingly insignificant relics left behind by each family member to illustrate who these people were and how they lived. The picture he paints is a bleak one and reflects the impoverished life which the residents lived within this now lonely and desolate building.
The text is very descriptive and loaded with symbols. The author takes the opportunity to relate elements of setting with symbols with meanings beyond the first reading’s impressions. The house that the characters rent for the summer as well as the surrounding scenery are introduced right from the beginning. It is an isolated house, situated "quite three miles from the village"(947); this location suggests an isolated environment. Because of its "colonial mansion"(946) look, and its age and state of degradation, of the house, a supernatural hypothesis is implied: the place is haunted by ghosts. This description also suggests stability, strength, power and control. It symbolizes the patriarchal oriented society of the author’s time. The image of a haunted house is curiously superimposed with light color elements of setting: a "delicious garden"(947), "velvet meadows"(950), "old-fashioned flowers, and bushes and gnarly trees"(948) suggest bright green. The room has "air and sunshine galore"(947), the garden is "large and shady"(947) and has "deep-shaded arbors"(948). The unclean yellow of the wallpaper is
In the detailed story of an impoverished family during the late 1900’s, Jeannette Walls describes her experience from the young age of 3, up until adulthood. The family of 6, with Rex Walls as the father, Rose Mary as the mother, and her three siblings, Lori, Brian and Maureen, were constantly moving throughout the country with little to no food or cash. The memoir shows how dysfunctional the family was, but never seemed to force the reader to condemn the parents. In a life of poverty, the have to move for own to town, and often lived in various mining towns. Although they each found something they learned to love (like Jeannette’s rock collection) in the desert, they had to leave them behind once Rex’s alcoholism only worsened, and they ran
“Flavio’s Home” by Gordon Parks is an essay full of emotions for Flavio Da Silva, the main character of the story. Flavio lives in extreme poverty and he serves as a leader for his younger brothers and sisters. The author emphasizes the horrible conditions in which Flavio and his family live in by stating phrases like, “The floor, rotting under layers of grease and dirt, caught shafts of light slanting down through spaces in the roof. A large hole in the far corner served as a toilet” (para. 6). As we can see the conditions in which this young man and his family live are atrocious. The misfortune for Flavio is just that, he lives a life that no could ever imagine living.
of this can be seen from the very first page of her book. Here, she begins to tell the story of traveling back to her old neighborhood, only to find it to be “a distinctly poorer one” than it was in her childhood days (1). To recreate the image for her readers, she presents them with a picture of what she compares to be likened to “a third-world country” She explains that “some of the stores had “rusted iron bars across their windows” while other businesses had been closed down and nailed up. She tells of several houses in the area having “boarded-up windows” and “graffiti, broken glass, and trash” strewn about, even though it appeared people were still living there. By painting a picture for her audience the author is able to virtually take them to the very road she once
Kathleen Grissom’s The Kitchen House is an intense, gripping novel set at the turn of the nineteenth century, entertaining and educating about life in the Old South. The first person narration switches between Lavinia McCarten, a young, white indentured servant, and Belle, the caretaker of Lavinia who is also the mixed, illegitimate daughter of Master Pyke. Both of the speakers live in the kitchen house of a tobacco plantation called Tall Oaks, Virginia. When the story begins in 1791, Belle is a young woman, and she teaches six-year-old Lavinia how to cook, clean, and serve. As Lavinia matures, she realizes that her fair skin makes her different from the slaves, her true family, and she learns to accept her responsibilities. Through the eyes of the two, readers learn about what life was like during the times of American slavery. Important themes prevalent in The Kitchen House include racism, drug and alcohol abuse, and innocence.
From the first lines of The House of the Spirits, Allende uses the technique of a feminized magical realism to pull the reader into a political-historical novel. Alba Trueba from Allende’s The House of the Spirits is an effective example of this revolutionary female narration. Her story, which includes her female relatives’ viewpoints and excludes Trueba’s version, is a direct block to Trueba’s egotistic, stiff, and not exactly true version of events. Her woman-centered narration is, further, a symbol of the triumph of women’s expression and their revision of patriarchal and authoritarian history. Alba watches the military erase history and devastate the country, but she in turn uses her power of writing to resist. Alba and her female, therefore,
As Vance writes his book he provides an honest testimony of his life. He writes about difficult parts of his life that were no doubt hard to relive let alone write. Vance is an honest analysis of his own life and the lives of hillbillies because he retells painful truths from his past. He is honest because he writes scenes that not only paint his closest loved ones as less than appealing at times, but he also paints himself that way. He includes scenes about his much loved, respected, and revered for grandparents that shows that they weren’t perfect. “I'd like to tell you my grandparents thrived in their new environment, how they raised a successful family, and how they retired comfortably middle-class. But that is a partial truth. The full truth is that my grandparents struggled in their new life, and they continued to do so for decades.” (30) This is not the first or last time that Vance gives an honest assessment of himself and those around him, telling the painful truths about their shortcomings. He tells scenes that most people wouldn’t want to remember or have other people associate with their family. He talks about the parts that he admires like the hillbillies fierce loyalty, and he talks about the things that he wishes he could change, like their learned helplessness. It is J.D. Vance's honesty about the good and bad parts of his culture that help
Immediately in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” readers are able to tell that the protagonist feels trapped in the room, in which she is being placed. The female narrator also mentions to us that her husband “John is a physician, and perhaps –– (I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind –– perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster” (Stetson 1892, 129). That is to say, this statement clearly indicates that science triumphs over the fantasy of religion. Therefore, John intellectually dominates his wife as a result of this view and his gender. Throughout the story, readers are able to observe themes from “The Yellow Wallpaper,” such as powerlessness, patriarchy, and lack of independence. As a result, Gilman 's protagonist does not have a room of her own. Despite, the struggles that the narrator faces in the room, “it makes [her] think of English places that you read about” (Stetson 1892, 130). Basically, the narrator tries to make herself feel comfortable while she is in the room and she is also able to express herself on paper, although her husband, John insists that she should not. According to Gilman’s protagonist, “I did write for a while in spite of them; but it does exhaust me a good deal¬––having to be so sly about it, or else meet with heavy opposition” (Stetson 1892, 129). This statement explains that the narrator expresses a need for independence by removing herself from the
This passage introduces the theme of the need for brotherhood that will continue throughout the novel. The tenant does not understand how one could accept a paying job knowing that many other families with children are starving and out of work. The tenant believes that all the tenants must work together in order to endure the terrible working
Growing-up in a predominately Mexican/Mexican-American community as a first-generation girl, like I did, is no walk in the park. Not only was I to uphold my parent’s traditional Mexican values such as: learning to cook and keep to a household, as well as a marriage, but also to uphold my new American values of independence and success measured in money as well as in property. At school I was taught to forget my first language, Spanish, and speak only in English, reminding me that: “You don’t want to speak with an accent.” At home I was reminded that Spanish, was and still is my first language and to leave English for school use only, reminding me that: “We can’t understand you in English.” Through this tug-of-war, between both cultures expectations of who I was to be/become, there was a desperate need to find my own identity, away from either culture. Sandra Cisneros’, The House on Mango Street, documents the need and struggle to find one’s own identity, through the narrator Esperanza’s experiences growing-up in a predominately Latino community in Chicago. Throughout the book Esperanza tries to understand the many different factors that influence her life and identity: in particular ethnicity and gender. Although, Esperanza suggest that she doesn’t want to be identified by either her Mexican identity or her sex; both of these factors play a major role in her struggle to find her own identity, by the way that they are intertwined in her own thoughts and in the descriptions of
One’s heritage and identity should not be separated from one’s everyday life. The “Everyday Use” story takes place in the late 1960s in the southern regions of America during the time when African Americans were fighting for their identity and to preserve whatever heritage they have. According to the statement that Mama made, “colored asked fewer questions then than they do now” . In the yard, Mama awaits her daughter’s return. The theme setting plays an important role in this story because of Dee, the eldest daughter chooses to leave the place where she had grown up because she believes that nothing will become of her if she stays in her home town. She chooses to leave home and get an education while her sister Maggie stays home and is looked down upon by her sister because she chose to stay at home. According to Mama, “A yard like this is more comfortable than most people know. It is not just a yard. It is an extended living room.”1 The yard and the comparison to the living room are very clear that one think of one’s living room as a