The Flowers by Alice Walker Continuation
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Very sad micro mini story of a young girl and her terrible discovery of a lynched man.
This impacted me more than other "loss of innocence" stories because of the protagonist's young age and her exposure to a hate crime. Furthermore, it was touching to show Myop's maturity through such a selfless act at the end. Between this and "Everyday Use," Alice Walker is becoming one of my favorite short story authors for developing her characters so well.
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Here are some of the questions I had to answer from the story! Hope this helps anyone who's reading it for class!
1. Alice Walker was named the protagonist of the short story Myop. What does myop mean? What is significant and important about Alice Walker using Myop as the main character's name? Make
Here are some of the questions I had to answer from the story! Hope this helps anyone who's reading it for class!
1. Alice Walker was named the protagonist of the short story Myop. What does myop mean? What is significant and important about Alice Walker using Myop as the main character's name? Make sure to connect your answer back to literary devices in the text.
In Alice Walkers' short story "The Flowers", the 10-year-old protagonist's name is Myop, an unusual name that could be short for "Myopia" the condition of nearsightedness, a common vision condition in which you can see objects near to you clearly, but objects farther away are blurry. This could be significant to the story because of how Myop's youth and innocence, blind her to danger and to the effects of lynching and slavery in her post-civil-war life. The imagery (especially in the second paragraph of page 1) and the tone in this short story also support this, for example, "She felt light and good in the warm sun. She was ten, and nothing existed for her but her song" (Walker, 1). implies how Myop doesn't see or understand issues currently going on in her life because of how nothing else existed for her but her song. Alice Walker could have chosen Myop as the name of the protagonist to further her point of Myop being young and naive and unable to see dangers in her life due to her 'nearsightedness'.
2. How does the historical context/ time provide context to your understanding of the text? What historical elements influenced Walker's writing? Use specific examples from the text to support.
The historical context provided with this story helps with understanding the text as it helps paint a picture of the dangers and the violence which occurred at the end of the story. When we read this story in class, I could hear other groups talk about how the man at the end of the story had committed suicide, however with the historical context provided, the man probably had been lynched. Historical context is extremely important in literature as it provides a clearer way to infer about the text, and helps us separate our modern understanding to a more accurate and historical one. The historical elements that influenced Walker's writing are likely racism and sexism in the United States of America during and after the civil war from the 1860s to the early 1900s. One specific element from the text that makes me think this is when "Myop watched the tiny white bubbles disrupt the thin black scale of soil and the water silently rose and slid away down the stream" (Walker, 1). The precise wording of this leads me to believe that this is a metaphor for the white-on-black racism that was happening in the time period of this story. Another metaphor that Walker used was "Today she made her own path, bouncing this way and that way, vaguely keeping an eye out for snakes" (Walker, 1). I mentioned the element of feminism in this piece, and this sentence represents how Walker believes that young women should be able to make their "own path" and decisions in their lives without having to "look out for snakes" or tip-toe around egos and a patriarchal society. As you can see, historical context is extremely important to understanding literary devices and this story along with Walker's perspective on racism and sexism.
3. There is a particular symbolic element in this short story that allows the reader to better understand the thematic statement of the text. What is the symbol and how does it represent the thematic statement?
The symbolic element in this story is the flowers that Myop collects and eventually lays down on the body of the lynched man. "The days had never been as beautiful as these" (Walker, 1). represents the joy and merriness of childhood and how when we are young, life is at its most beautiful as nothing has yet clouded our joyous outlook on life. During this happy period, Myop plays with chickens, hums a beat of a song, and collects flowers before the mood of her outlook becomes more gloomy and unpleasant. Once Myop discovers the body, she lays the flowers down on him and the author writes "And the summer was over" (Walker, 2). symbolizing the loss of the childish innocence and happy days that Myop was experiencing at the beginning of the story. The flowers being left behind with the man represent how Myop would leave behind her innocence there as well as further the thematic statement that we lose innocence once we experience traumatic events.
Here is also my literary analysis:
Flowers and Woods
In her story, "The Flowers", Alice Walker uses two main symbols, flowers and the body of the lynched man, in order to convey the greater themes of her story, childhood development and racial hatred. We first see Myop interact with the flowers when she is bouncing down the path that she makes on her own. Notably, when she first collects these flowers, the atmosphere portrayed by Walker is fantastical and unrealistic before the abrupt transition into the second half of the story. The author also intentionally provides a great amount of imagery of this scene, writing, "She found, in addition to various common but pretty ferns and leaves, an armful of strange blue flowers with velvety ridges and a sweet suds bush full of brown, fragrant buds" (Walker 1). Painting a vivid picture of the blossoms in the readers' minds, Walker connects the fantasy-like atmosphere to these flowers, specifically having Myop carrying them with her until the conclusion of the story. From the imagery provided, Walker adds to the happy-go-lucky atmosphere by intertwining the flowers to this part of Myop's youth and then strikingly throwing Myop into a dark and violent reality, leaving behind the happy mood. Once finding the body of the lynched man, Myop leaves her flowers behind, laying them down by him. Once she leaves these flowers, which symbolize her childhood happiness and innocence, Walker closes the story with "And the summer was over" (Walker 2), an allegory conveying to the reader the loss of the sunny and happy atmosphere of Myop's childhood. Also, when this abrupt switch in mood changes, so does the setting around Myop, when she stumbles upon a dead African-American man on her way home, leading to the next symbol in the story, the lynched man. Even though Myop did not recognize this man, she still felt the pain of his death when she found his body. Although Walker described him as a tall and large man (Walker 2), the man was not able to escape the racially motivated crime. Presuming that this man met his fate of being lynched, due to Walker's description of the rose growing around the noose (Walker 2), we can assume that Walker also meant for this man to symbolize a much larger population of African-Americans that were affected by hate crimes in the 70s. Using the "innocent eye" to further this point, Walker used Myop's naive perspective to explain how no African-American was able to avoid the violence of racism in the post-civil-rights era. The author of "The Flowers" is extremely precise with her wording throughout her story and the literary devices that she uses to further her thematic statement. In order to do this, Walker used the eponymous Flowers and the lynched man to represent Myop's childhood loss of innocence and racial hatred in the 1970s.
Ανατριχιαστική.Καθηλωτική.Αναπάντεχη.Κάπως έτσι θα χαρακτήριζα αυτήν την ιστορία . Οι λέξεις όμως δεν επαρκούν .
Η Myop ,ένα 10χρονο κοριτσάκι ,απολαμβάνει τη φύση και βοηθάει την οικογένειά της στη συγκομιδή .Νιώθει τη ζεστασιά του ήλιου , τους ήχους του φυσικού περιβάλλοντος και τους ενσωματώνει στο δικό της τραγούδι .Η περιέργειά της όμως δεν την αφήνει σε ησυχία και αποφασίζει να εξερευνήσει το δάσος μόνη της .Χωρίς τους δικούς της
Η απώλεια της παιδικής αθωότητας σε κλάσματα δευτερολέπτου!Ανατριχιαστική.Καθηλωτική.Αναπάντεχη.Κάπως έτσι θα χαρακτήριζα αυτήν την ιστορία . Οι λέξεις όμως δεν επαρκούν .
Η Myop ,ένα 10χρονο κοριτσάκι ,απολαμβάνει τη φύση και βοηθάει την οικογένειά της στη συγκομιδή .Νιώθει τη ζεστασιά του ήλιου , τους ήχους του φυσικού περιβάλλοντος και τους ενσωματώνει στο δικό της τραγούδι .Η περιέργειά της όμως δεν την αφήνει σε ησυχία και αποφασίζει να εξερευνήσει το δάσος μόνη της .Χωρίς τους δικούς της . Κι ο λόγος είναι ότι θέλει να το δει το καλοκαίρι .Πόσο πιο όμορφο θα ήταν το δάσος το καλοκαίρι όταν το φθινόπωρο που το επισκέφθηκε την είχε τόσο μαγέψει;
Στην εξερεύνησή της λοιπόν συναντά έναν λιντζαρισμένο άντρα .
Αγαπημένο σημείο για μένα το φινάλε της ιστορίας που συμβολίζει την προσγείωση στη σκληρή πραγματικότητα της ζωής και την απώλεια της παιδικής αθωότητας:
Myop laid down her flowers.
And the summer was over.
Εύστοχα όλα όσα γράφτηκαν στην ιστορία .Ωστόσο ,κατά την ταπεινή μου άποψη ,θα ήθελα να είναι λίγο μεγαλύτερη ώστε να αποκτούσα μεγαλύτερη οικειότητα με την ηρωίδα.
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Yet, there are legions of stories within this story!
This is one of my new favorites!
The last line "and the summer was over" is so piercing and shows that her childhood has ended.
This short story screams symbolism and imagery! A powerful and heartbreaking short story about the end of an age of innocence. An innocent child stumbles across the decomposing remains of a lynched African American man who has also been tortured.
The last line "and the summer was over" is so piercing and shows that her childhood has ended.
This short story screams symbolism and imagery! ...more
Alice has a beautiful way of writing that isn't really appreciated until the second or third reading. I will most definitely look for her work after reading this.
I really loved the simplicity of this story. Following a girl picking flowers and we comes across something that we don't recognise at first.Alice has a beautiful way of writing that isn't really appreciated until the second or third reading. I will most definitely look for her work after reading this.
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This is just so beautiful and so bruised. It's a coming of age short story that sheds the light on how ugly the world really is. Themes like losing innocence, racism and lynching are easily picked and portrayed. Little Myop saw the brutality of the world and how sickening it is and instead of running back afraid,
"Myop laid down her flowers.Wow..
And the summer was over."
This is just so beautiful and so bruised. It's a coming of age short story that sheds the light on how ugly the world really is. Themes like losing innocence, racism and lynching are easily picked and portrayed. Little Myop saw the brutality of the world and how sickening it is and instead of running back afraid,
"Myop laid down her flowers....more
And the summer was over."
This story reminds me of George Floyd, who died of suffocation by a policeman in the United States only because he was a black man, Just before he died, he was saying" I can't breathe".The
In "The Flowers by Alice Walker "The main character is myop , and her name caught my attention . It has been shortened from myopic, so I think that the writer gave her this name on purpose. Maybe she wants to tell the readers that Myop looks at events closely and kindly, avoiding the painful side of real life.This story reminds me of George Floyd, who died of suffocation by a policeman in the United States only because he was a black man, Just before he died, he was saying" I can't breathe".The same method of killing,suffocation,which prevent breath and freedom .
When the child wanted to return to her home where is her peace. What is meant here is not the house as a building, but rather her homeland, which she was deprived of. The girl's desire to return to her home is similar to the desire of us Palestinians to restore our homeland. The man in the story could not breathe, so he dey. and the Palestinians have also been unable to breathe since 1948.
They say that your whole life is related to a situation that happened to you in childhood and your current life is affected by it without you even knowing. In the story,seeing the dead man changed myop's life, And her childhood was over not the summer.
As for the rhetorical tools, they were employed in the story significantly Such as describing the weather, which symbolizes continuous change, and hints that there is an unexpected event that will change the whole story.
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တိုင်းပြည်ရဲ့ အာဏာသိမ်းမှုနဲ့ ဆက်စပ်ကာ ဖတ်မိတော့ အခုကာလမှာ ကြီးပြင်းလာရတဲ့ကလေးငယ်တွေရဲ့ ဘဝကို စာနာမိတယ်။
စစ်ဖိနပ်အောက်က အနိုင်ကျင့်မှု။
မရိုးရှင်းတဲ့ နိုင်ငံရေးကစားကွက်တွေ။
လူသားမဆန်တဲ့ အရိုင်းစိတ်များ။
လူသေရဲ့ ဦးခေါင်းခွံပေါ် ခြေချော်ကျမိတဲ့ မိုင်အော့ပ်လေးလိုပဲ။
အခုတော့ နှင်းဆီပန်းကလေးဟာ လူသတ်လက်နက်နဲ့အတူ တောအုပ်တနေရာမှာ ပွင့်ဖူးနေရောတဲ့လေ။
လေနဲ့အတူတူ သစ်ကိုင်းတွေ၊အခက်တွေကြား ကြိုးစက ဟိုဒီယိမ်းထိုးနေလေရဲ့။
This was skilfully done but if you're gonna flash (fiction) me I would like all kinds of small memorable details / imagery every other sentence, not just every paragraph or so.
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Source: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25033878-the-flowers
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