The Flower Garden is a story about a middle aged woman named Mrs. Winning who meets her new neighbors, the MacLanes. The MacLanes are a small family with just Mrs. MacLane and her son, Davey. They are friendly to each other at first, but near the end of the story, they begin to grow apart and become less friendly to each other. Mrs. Winning and the whole town for that matter seem to suddenly distrust and dislike the MacLanes.
This story is broken into two sections. The one at the beginning is about friendship and the other is about distrust, fear, and hatred. I am noticing that the author of this story (also the author of The Lottery) has used this same kind of structure/style for both of his stories. This is no coincidence; it is simply his style.
This style that the author uses is a kind of trickery. For the whole of the beginning, he leads you with good fortune, trust, happiness, and friendliness. But the story then takes a shocking twist toward distrust and anger that you wouldn't really expect, but that is how he keeps you interested. One example of Mrs. Winning's friendliness to Mrs. MacLane is a quote from the story. The author writes, "As the weather grew warmer and the first signs of green showed on the trees and on the wet ground, Mrs. Winning and Mrs. MacLane became better friends. They met almost daily at the grocery and walked up the hill together..." The author comes out completely saying that Mrs. Winning and Mrs. MacLane are becoming better friends. Now this quote appears on page 114 of the story. This is relatively the beginning of the story so you can see how the author leads you in the beginning with happiness, friendship, and trust. But then as the story continues, they seem to grow farther and farther apart to the point that they are just neighbors, nothing more. At the very end of the story, the author writes, "Mrs. MacLane waved and called out, Hello! Mrs. Winning swung around without speaking and started, with great dignity, back up the hill toward the old Winning house." As you can see, at the very end of the story, Mrs. Winning even refuses to converse with Mrs. MacLane and simply walks away. They are obviously no longer friends, proving my point.
Woo,
ReplyDeleteI liked your post about the story, but you repeated yourself a lot. Something that I noticed you did was you said the same thing only in different ways. Something that I also noticed you did was you didn't state or focus on the english subjects that we talked about the same day.
Woo, thanks for editing your entry for mechanical errors. Good work! Now, pay attention to the content. As Mason noticed, you do repeat yourself throughout this entry. Try structuring your entries to include topic sentences, supporting ideas, and transition/closing sentences. If you do this, you will repeat yourself less. Also, be careful to check your facts. The author is Shirley Jackson" She is not a "he" as you mention several times. Finally, I was surprised that you felt the stories were divided into two parts with a sudden twist. Actually, there are many examples of foreshadowing throughout both stories that lead the reader on the journey from the ordinary events to the shocking twist at the end. You may want to reread the entries to see this.
ReplyDelete3/5 points. Structure and content errors.