The Street Ann Petry Analysis

Ellen is a housewife and she is always by herself with the baby. While she waits for Paul for lunch she believes they are having an unstable relationship. In the beginning of the story, Ellen becomes lonely as she really wants to feel his arms supporting her. Ellen’s thoughts are shown through the wind when the author tells “At each blast of wind it shook as if to topple and spin hurtling with the dust fell into space” (Ross 64). The wind clearly embraces Ellen as she sees herself not with Paul in the future. She believes Paul and herself having an unstable rough relationship. She thinks that they should understand each other and have their relationship to see Paul coming for lunch she sees two different winds. Ellen views the winds to herself, the wind in fight images her desire to hold back her feelings but the wind that pursued makes her reflect about Paul’s attitude and decision which makes herself angry towards Paul causing their marriage to ruin. Lastly, as the conflict starts when the reader sees the light and shadow between them, Ellen and Paul begin an argument. Ellen believes that they should leave for their baby health but Paul suggests they should stay because it is safe to stay inside from the storm also that he can maintain the farm. Ellen and Paul fight which is causing them to become separate hatred between their relationship. During their argument, Ellen

Joan Didion uses pathos to argue that Santa Ana causes people to have weird behaviors. When Joan uses the example that the “Indians would throw themselves into the sea,”(Didion) she creates the emotion of sadness and shock. Didion chose these emotions to show that the wind makes people do strange actions. She also says that, “every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands necks. Anything can happen.”(Didion) She causes a sense of horror using the excerpt from, “On nights like that” by Raymond Chandler. It gives a sense of horror because it shows how far the wind can make people do bad actions when the wind blows. Joan Didion incorporates

Due to this, the family steals food in order to cure their hunger. This shows the theme beacuse it shows that in times of need, sometimes people have to do what is best for themselves instead of thinking about others. The Street also shows the same theme by using the wind as an annoyance to the people in the street, an event in the excerpt. “It wrapped newspaper around their feet entangling them until the people cursed deep in their throats, stamped their feet, and kicked off the paper.” (Petry 2). Due to the wind, the people are inferior and are becoming annoyed with everything that is being thrown at them. This annoyance causes the people the make violent remarks. Because of the wind, the people were forced to do these things even if some of them didn’t want to. Overall, both McCourt and Petry used events to help tell the theme.

The intensely reckless nature of the "November wind" becomes evident as it continues "its violent assault" upon the people between 7th and 8th street. Additionally, the wind "did everything it could to discourage people", including the protagonist, Lutie, as it "wrapped newspaper" around the passerby's feet, and "blew back and back again" until forcing pedestrians to stop their stroll through the street. Yet, it committed the most "Violent assault against" Lutie, as it continued to irk Lutie until it left her with only a modicum sense of courage to continue her search. The wind, by pushing away a sign, serves to demonstrate the sense of dread Lutie feels as she wanders purposely through the street, but leaves her feeling as though "there wasn't any point" in continuing her search for a home. Thus, the embittered wind exposes Lutie's internalized fears of the environment around her; but in contempt of this, Lutie's triumph against the wind, by reading the sign for a room exactly as she desired, establishes the protagonist as someone who, undeterred by hardships, maintains their will and continues to exhibit their

It’s known to Lutie that the paper, dust, and grime, does not seem to get in her face and anger her like everyone else. The quote that talks about the newspaper that wraps around their feet and triggers the people, causing them to kick their feet in annoyance toward the paper, is an example of parallelism. The reasoning behind this is that the quote gives detail into what causes the citizens difficulty and trouble. However, there are parts of the given story where only the wind plays a difficult and impenetrable effect on the way it deals people with very hectic trouble, which causes them dismay. For example, when Ann Petry expresses that the wind blew newspaper back again and again, it shows the rhetorical device known as an epizeuxis. This is defined as one word that is repeated for emphasis. This shines the focus on how the wind affects the citizens that are moving throughout the street, as they deal with the pain in their eyes and throat, and changes the way they experience their own environment. The citizens in the urban city definitely have a dismantled

The buildings were described as having, “small-paned high windows in the peaks of their steep gables were like knowing eyes,” as to make the infrastructure have human features to look at the narrator and scene around it. When the narrator is with Mrs. Todd and her herbal remedies the humanity of the town grows with the mystical qualities of the herbs as the remedies themselves “whispered directions could be heard as customers passed the windows” and the wind blew by, ““adverse winds at sea might also find their proper remedies.” By personifying the town itself and making it not only the setting, but a character, Jewett deepens the meaning of her excerpt to have a mystical tone and maintain the

The novel The Divine Wind by Garry Disher reflects on values, ideas, experiences and beliefs experienced by Hartley Penrose and his family and friends. Set in Broome, the story follows the characters as they experience the harsh implications of World War 2 and its effect on their lives. Disher reflects on subjects relevant to society today, such as racism and prejudice, friendships and relationships and the importance of family.

At the beginning of the passage, Petry uses imagery in order to set the environment in which the main character is introduced. Petry starts off with “a cold November wind blowing through the 116th street” in order to show the environment as cold and breezy by saying the “cold” wind that is blowing around they urban city and the “dirt blowing around into people’s eyes” to introduce the setting. She then goes to further introduce the setting by talking about the scraps of paper flying around and how it did everything it could in order to “discourage the people walking along the streets.” This allows the reader to picture the urban setting by appealing to their sense of touch where you can feel the cold climate in the city and create a picture in their mind of garbage and paper flying around and hindering the people’s lives. Petry uses this in order to highlight Lutie Johnson’s eventual introduction to the urban setting and her unfamiliarity with the urban by letting us predict the challenges Lutie Johnson will soon face there. Petry is able to create images in our head in order to show Lutie Johnson in the urban setting; you are able to feel the cold,

The Santa Ana Winds that whip through Southern California are seemingly a natural event, however their presence has proved to be anything but to the civilians of the area. The character of winds for years has integrated into the culture of Californians, creating not only an emotional but ecological footprint pressed into the lives of thousands during the fall and winter months. Two authors: Linda Thomas and Joan Didion, natives of Southern California, collectively tackle the chronicle of the Santa Ana Winds, however, both share distinct testimonies of their experiences with such a fierce and fiery personality.

Petry contrats Lutie and the wind to help reveal Lutie’s personality to the reader. Petry compares the force of the wind to that of a “violent assault”. The wind also caused chaos as it “rattled the tops of garbage cans”, “sucked window shades out” , and “ drove most people off the street”. The use of this imagery helps the reader understand the force of the wind and some of the challenges it posed to those who dared venture outside. The use of imagery

Elijah Anderson’s novel, Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City, offers the reader a glimpse of what life is like being a black youth living in the inner-city. Living by the “code of the street”, a term Anderson uses to describe the unwritten rules many youth in the inner-city when interacting with others, these young people often find themselves on the destructive path to delinquency. Through a lack of role models, a sweeping change in the global market, the ever enticing underground drug trade, the constant institutional discrimination towards African Americans, and the corruption of the criminal justice system, the people who live by the code of the street become a part of an alienated subculture. Through

It had been raining intermittently for the past four days and by late Saturday afternoon, another storm was approaching the rural southern town of Wrongberight. Clemmy Sue Jarvis since birth has lived in the town and had a simple philosophy concerning weather. As long as she was six feet above ground instead of six feet below, she did not care what it was. Today as she lifts her petite frame into her rusty Ford pickup, she is preoccupied with what she hopes to accomplish this evening. Absorbed in though she pulls out of her driveway and heads south on Flat Bottom Road along the edge the Dismal Swamp towards the isolated home of her dearest friend Estelle

When describing the winds, Didion paints a somber and gloomy picture. “There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air… some unnatural stillness, some tension,” starts the article off with the image of Los Angeles people in a sense of stillness or tense. Didion continues by explaining that the uneasiness is because the Santa Ana winds have arrived. Through the pictures that Didion paints, the reader begins to see the Santa Ana winds as an uncomfortable atmosphere. She then adds, “Blowing up sandstorms out along Route 66… we will see smoke back in the canyons, and hear sirens in the night,” further proving the uneasiness that comes with the somber image of Los Angeles. “The baby frets. The maid sulks,” she adds, painting the distressing image of the effect that the Santa Ana has on people. Didion, in trying to show the craziness associated with the Santa Ana

In Ann Petry’s 1946 novel The Street, the author establishes Lutie Johnson’s distant, discouraging, distracted, and finally dominant demeanor to the urban setting mostly through the use of personification.

The author begins the essay with a tone that is kind of spooky which puts the reader in an unsettling mindset. “There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension. What it means is that tonight a Santa Ana will begin to blow, a hot wind from the northeast whining down through the Cajon and San Gorgonio Passes, blowing up sand storms out along Route 66, drying the hills and the nerves to flash point.” Here she uses imagery to assist her audience in becoming as engaged in her surroundings as she is. Doing this also helps her audience feel the same way as the speaker, who seems to be frightened and anxious about what could happen next. She is told stories of how the natives responded to the wind changing the way it is currently. As she is listens to the stories of the town it’s as if she is listening to stories that go along with a haunted house