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The Sun Parlor, By Dorothy West

Decent Essays

In a time in your life, did you ever have a prized possession so special, that you were scared to ruin it, so you ended up not playing with it, or touching it to avoid leaving as much as a fingerprint on it? Well, if you have, then I think you will relate to this short story by Dorothy West. The Sun Parlor, by Dorothy West, is a fictional story about a room in a family’s house. A room that started off so plain, and probably a little bit unappreciated, then one summer, it was transformed. It was so entrancing, warm, and welcoming, it soon became a room everybody wanted to be in for various amounts of reasons. It was as if the sun parlor were a rollercoaster, its bright and beautiful yellow walls were the line, and you were waiting at …show more content…

Sun Parlor, a fictional story teaching readers the importance of treasuring great things rather than keeping them to yourself, rather than being worried about ruining its caliber, has a depressing tone. Throughout this story, you can start to see a gradual incline of disappointment by this magical room. For instance, “she was in the hospital ten days. When she was ready to come home to convalesce, we turned the sun parlor into a sickroom, for the stairs to the upper story were forbidden to her. At night we who, when she slept upstairs, would talk family talk back and forth from our beds far into the night, without her we were now quiet, not wanting our voices to wake her if she was asleep, knowing her recovery depended on rest and quiet. But at night she slept fitfully. The sleeping house and separation from the flock were unbearable.”( West,1984,p.494)This passage from the story describes the downhill of events happening especially because of this room. The lapse of the narrator’s aunt shows us that the tone of this essay is probably going to be somewhat emotional. Next, though I don’t know the year this story took place, I know that the setting was in the family’s house. “We lived in a beautiful house. The reason I knew that is because all my mother’s friends said so, and brought their other friends to see it. On the day appointed for the tour, which included inspection of every room on every floor, my mother would gather us around her and say in her gentlest

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