The Geranium And The Short Story

Right from the start of his story, O’Brien mentions flashbacks and shows their influence in the mind of a soldier like Jimmy Cross. The story starts off with Jimmy telling the reader about a girl from back home named, Martha. As soon as she is mentioned he drifts into a reminiscent state of mind, imagining romantic camping trips, but this is short lived, as he is quick to jump back into reality and move his men along. However, it is not long before he beings to think of her later that night. This begins the first of many flashbacks throughout the story.

In the exposition, O 'Connor immediately presents the characterization of the overbearing Grandmother. This introduces the conflict that the Grandmother is set on getting her way above the family’s wishes. The reader needs to understand this characterization because it helps understand why the ending is so significant when she offers grace to the misfit and redeems herself. The author, O 'Connor, develops her plot chronologically, immediately stating the initial conflict of The Grandmothers manipulative tendency. The reader discovers there is an escaped criminal on the loose, the Grandmother uses this in her favor, she says, “Here this fellow calls himself the misfit is loose from the federal pen and headed toward Florida and you read here what it says he’d do to these people. Just you read it. I wouldn’t take my children in any direction with a criminal like that a loose in it. I couldn’t answer to my conscience if I did,” (O 'Connor 470). Her manipulation disconnects her from the reader in order to convey the theme when she changes in the end. If she started as a good person and was a likable character in the story, O 'Connor would not be able to get her purpose across that bad people can redeem themselves.

Eugenia Collier uses diction and imagery to create the voice of her narrator, Lizabeth, in her short story “Marigolds.” Lizabeth has a negative tone in the beginning of the story. The imagery she stated, “When I think of my hometown, all that I seem to remember is dust- the brown crumbly dust of late summer-arid, sterile dust that gets into the eyes and makes them water (Collier)...” proves that she is unhappy to be in that place. There are a lot of reasons why she is unhappy in that place and one of them is poverty. Lizabeth hinted that one of their struggles was poverty when she said “Poverty is a cage in which we all are trapped, and our hatred of it was still the vague, undirected restlessness of the zoo-bred flamingo who knows that nature created him to fly flee (Collier).” Lizabeth established the juxtaposition when she said, “And one other thing I remember, another incongruency of memory-a brilliant splash of sunny yellow against the dust-Miss Lottie’s marigolds (Collier).” She is stating that Miss Lottie’s marigolds were the only beautiful thing in that unsightly place. Those marigolds did not give her a pleasant feeling because she thought that they were too beautiful to exist in that kind of place. Miss Lottie was believed to be a witch when Lizabeth was young but she knows she is mature enough not believe in those things anymore. Their first encounter resulted in Lizabeth and her company destroying some of Miss Lottie’s marigolds and they left Miss Lottie and John Burke, her son, enraged. When she got home and went to her room hoping to rest after a long day, she overheard her parents talking. She heard her dad say, “ Twenty two years, Maybelle, twenty two years…and I got nothing for you, nothing, nothing (Collier).” She then realized that her father got fired from his job and was not taking it too well after what they have been through. Maybelle, Lizabeth’s mother, attempted to comfort her husband by saying, “Honey, you took good care of us when you had it. Ain’t nobody got nothing nowadays (Collier).” After a while of discussion Lizabeth’s father began to sob, loudly and painfully. At this point, LIzabeth is confused because she never heard a man cry before. She did not even know that men cry.

Both Lee and Collier use diction and imagery to create a mood of lethargicness. In “Marigolds” by Eugenia W. Collier the narrator starts by discussing how “I remember only the dry September of the dirt roads and grassless yards”(Collier 6-7). In this excerpt the diction in words like dry and the imagery of the lifeless landscape show the mood that it is lethargic and slow. In the second excerpt, from “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee she talks about her hometown, Maycomb, and describes the town on a sweltering day and says “In rainy weather the streets turned to red slop; grass grew on the sidewalk, the courthouse sagged”(Lee 1-2). The diction in the words like slop and sagged indicates that there is an absence in people taking care of

Writers are able to leave their personal fingertips on their pieces, which is why writing is such a beautiful hobby. Whether one is writing poetry, short stories, novels, scripts, articles, etc., the diversity and uniqueness is absolutely amazing. In order for writers to keep their pieces original, they use literary devices such as imagery, juxtaposition, and diction. These devices help create something called voice, which is essentially the special way an author writes, including word choice and the way the author communicates his or hers ideas. These three literary devices are used frequently in the short story “Marigolds,” and each of them contribute to the author’s voice.

Many memories for young children involve a special individual who made specific events during their childhood, vividly stand out to them as adults. In “Tender Stranger” written by Phillip Lopate, a memory is told from the perspective of a young boy. He is on his way to school when he suddenly bumps into a lawyer on the street corner. In “Novella” written by Robert Hass, the memory is from a young girl who develops a friendship with an elderly gentleman who lives in a cabin deep in the woods. The young boy meets the lawyer on the busy sidewalk and never sees him again, while the young girl forms an extensive friendship as she and the elderly man visit often. The vivid childhood memories of these two relationships play a significant role in the character’s life, whether it was a short encounter or a long lasting friendship.

Throughout the novel there is a switch between the younger women experiencing the events as they occur and Orleanna reflecting back onto what the family faced. This allows the reader to be able to not only make predictions on what may happen throughout the course of the novel, but it also allows the reader to be able to see how the experiences has impacted one of the women, and understand how it may impact the rest of the women. Orleanna seems to be severely impacted by what she has experienced. She speaks in a sorrow-filled tone and expresses the regrets that she has about the whole trip. This shows the reader the transformation from a quiet woman with unspoken thoughts to one that has strong feelings and seems trapped in her guilt. On the other hand, by using narrators speaking in present tense offers a whole new outlook on each individual and how they change. Instead of seeing a direct before and after, there is a more subtle, slow change that can be viewed. As a result, the reader can see more in the character development as it unfolds. The audience is able to pick out the point where each of the women is forced to rethink her

The author heavily focuses heavily on memories. The half the book consists mostly of Ove’s memories. If it were not for the flashbacks one would not understand Ove. We

Flannery O’Connor was a southern belle born in Savannah, Georgia in 1925. She was a Catholic girl living in the Bible belt of the country. She lived in “two different worlds” (Meyer, 421); the fictional world that she created for her stories and her personal life. In her stories, she used exciting characters so that she could live through them and live an “interesting” life. She uses her stories to portray totally unanticipated, but totally plausible things. “O’Connor’s stories present complex experiences that cannot be tidily summarized; it takes the entire story to suggest the meanings” (Meyer, 426). She uses her characters to show irony, private experiences, fears, and diverse parallels into her story “Good Country People”.

To many critics, Flannery O’Connor was a“very devout catholic, [of the] (thirteenth century, [O’Connor described] herself),” suggests Mark Bosco a Jesuit priest, professor of Theology and English studies at Loyola University Chicago (qtd in Bosco 41). Along with being a native Georgian, O’Connor experienced life, albeit short lived, during an era of racial conflict. Although, she considered herself from another century, she was acutely aware of her twentieth century southern world, and furthermore she expressed it through her short stories. As Robert Drake a writer and Prof. at the University of Texas explains “[she wrote of what she] knew [to be] at her own doorstep” (Drake, “Apocalyptic Perception” 32), meaning that her strong religious

All the Marigols And The Migrant Mother The Great Depression Era,a time in American history when the nation feel into a time of poverty and hopelessness. People standing in lines for hours for a bowl of soup and a piece of bread.When jobs were few no matter how desperatly people looked for them.Doing without and wondering if or when a better time would come. The story "Marigolds"by Eugenia Collier is the memories of Lizabeth, a fourteen year old black girl in rural Maryland.When I think of that time and place ,I only remember the dry September of the dirt roads and grassless yards of the shantytown where I lived.Memory is an abstract painting - it does not present things as they are,but rather as they feel. Another inconsistency of memory, a brilliant splash of sunny yellow against the dust, Miss Lottie's marigolds. Lizabeth has a lot of memories.Fishing for minnows with cupped hands just to have them slip away.Loafing around trying to find something to do.The Childrens favorit thing to do was to annoy Miss Lottie.An old Indian woman they called a witch. Why ,when her shack seemed like it would fall down at anytime would she have beautiful mounds of

In the short story ”Marigolds” by Eugenia Collier the author uses several literary devices to create narrator’s voice and point of view. Collier uses flashback to create voice in several examples. When the narrator states “When I think of the hometown of my youth” (16) she is referring to a memory from a long ago in a flashback. This creates a point of reference for the reader to understand that the following story will be told from the narrator’s point of view as an adult. And the author uses flashback to cite some past scenes. When the narrator states “I remember fishing for minnows in a muddy creek and watching sadly as they eluded my cupped hands, while Joey laughed uproariously” (17) she is referring to a scene happened as in the past.

Mary Flannery O’Connor was an American writer. An important impact in American literature, she wrote two novels and thirty-two short stories, and six commentaries .She was a Southern writer who often wrote in a Southern Gothic style and relied heavily on regional settings and grotesque characters(Dunne). Her writing also reflected her own Roman Catholic faith, and frequently examined questions of morality and ethics. Flannery O’Connor was a very influential writer from the American Modernism era, mainly because she effectively reintroduced the Gothic literary tradition and mixed it with the Southern literary form.

Flannery O’Connor is one of the names that is closely related to the southern style of fiction.The American south one of the books that she has written in her early times has one of the main characters in her stories that play out almost the same rule of a vicious woman. Throughout “A Good Man is Hard to Find” images of the south are frequent and interesting, while we hear

The poem “The Geranium” by Theodore Roethke tells the story of a bachelor, formerly a party animal, now a lonely, aging man, through a sustained metaphor which uses the speaker’s geranium as a symbol for the disregard of his own health. The plant is never well, nor is he, due to the speaker being as inconsiderate to the geranium as he is to himself. With imagery, alliteration, and symbolism, much is learned about the speaker through a simple geranium to which he is intrinsically intertwined.