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Pigs In Heaven Analysis

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On pages 141 and 142 in Pigs in Heaven by Barbara Kingsolver, she asserts that luck has changed from being something that could be used to have fun with, to becoming a sad and depressing part of life because of how it was being used. Kingsolver supports her position by showing how Las Vegas had changed, and with it the luck involved. Kingsolver writes in an effort to relate luck to the previous part of the book about Lucky Buster being saved from falling into the Hoover Dam in order to show how luck and chance are a big theme and motif of the book. The author uses a narrative tone and tells the story in first person point of view showing that the audience is the general public and they all have more or less luck that they can relate with from the passage. The implementation of technology and …show more content…

This gives way to an underlying argument that Kingsolver makes, in which people can risk their own luck in whatever way they desire, and Lucky Buster seems to go to the far end of that spectrum. In the passage, as Alice and Turtle are walking, “A woman in leather shorts on a motorcycle runs the red light.” Many people test their luck in this fashion and consequently jeopardize the luck of others. Kingsolver adds this little detail to show all the means by which people risk their luck. People risk their chances in different ways, but Americans tend to do it a specific way, “Americans now prefer to lose their money in private.” This is alluding to the machinery that was put into casinos, in which the chance takers play against the technology rather than other people with the same belief in their own luck. The author added this remark because it was an effort to prove that bad luck can be embarrassing because losing all of one’s money is shameful, especially in front of a big group of people. Adding the machines changed the experimentation of luck as

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