Essay on Alice Walkers Everyday Use

This paper will explore various elements of fiction and literary techniques employed by Alice Walkers Everyday use as a work of fiction. Elements of fiction are elements that a writer uses to develop a story or a theme. Literary techniques are used to enhance the conveyance of a message in a piece of writing. Elements of fiction are more like parts of the story while literary techniques are methods used to complete each of these parts, make them informative and captivating. Setting is an element of fiction that address the question of where and when within a story. Flashback is a literary technique that involves recollections of past events within a story by the writer or a character. This paper is going to explore the use of these two aspects in Everyday use and how they help make the story covey the intended message.

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The setting of Everyday use revolves around the narrators yard and house. There are two types of setting. There is physical setting and chronological setting. Physical setting informs of the physical surroundings of the characters in the story while chronological setting gives the timeline of the events in the story. The narrator actually starts the story by describing her physical setting.

A yard like this is more comfortable than most people know. It is not just a yard. It is like an extended living room. When the hard clay is swept clean as a floor and the fine sand around the edges lined with tiny, irregular grooves, anyone can come and sit and look up into the elm tree and wait for the breezes that never come inside the house.

Later she describes the house which has no real window but rather hole cut on the walls. This is likely to help make estimation of the time in possibly history the story is based. This will therefore provide a reason for particular events and possibly what to expect as the story unfolds. The description of the state of the house also informs the reader of the financial tribulations the narrator and her daughter are facing. She also informs us of the time of day it is which constitutes chronological setting. Setting as an element of fiction is a crucial part of a story. It enables the reader to visualize the story physically and hence enhance understanding. The narrator in this case draws our interests into her environment so we can best understand the genesis of what is going to follow. The setting enables the reader to pieces together certain pieces of the story without necessarily reading them from the story.

Alice employs flashback quite well in her writing. The narrator uses flashback to draw back our attention to a TV program she believes everyone must have seen. She uses this to take the reader into a dream she dreams about her and her daughter. It is easy to relate the events in the TV program and the events in the narrators dream. This is flashback that is meant to help the reader relate other past events that are not part of the story. This will provide better understanding of the events at present and an anticipation of the events to follow.

In another instance where the narrator employs flashback, Mrs. Johnson draws our attention back to an event when Maggie suffered burn. This flashback gives enables the reader to draw relations between that event and the relationship between Dee and Maggie. It gives insight to the conflict between them. It enhances understanding of the qualities and characters exhibited by Dee and Maggie. This brings out the theme of relationships clearly, and aspects related to it such as disputes and conflict resolution. Flashback is a very effective tool of making a story captivating because it creates a deeper understanding of unfolding events and characters.