Everyday Use #1

This short story written by Alice Walker confused me greatly. I had trouble keeping up with what the author was trying to shape together by the miscellaneous details and I just couldn't really seem to grasp what it was throughout. Now when I looked up and saw that chapter three in this book is all about characterization it helped me out a little, so I reread it and looked for the real development behind the main character. I noticed little details the second time that showed how brilliantly the author snuck in little mentions here and there that helped create the mother's personality so well. The way that she snakes her way around not giving the quilts away really intrigued me as a reader and allowed some interesting dialect to occur. I like that way that she stops herself from judging others because this gives her a very welcoming persona to go nicely with the content she that she has from being stripped down to nothing but her home. The author adequately characterizes the remainder of the girls very nicely by including a lot of emotional clues. Such as when the quilt argument is taking place, "Dee looked at me with hatred"(Walker). The subtle hints that Walker includes about not telling Dee that the Mother is really holding off on the quilts because she wants to give them to Maggie shows her goodheartedness but also revealed some of her character at the same time. In the end, I wasn't sure if I thought that the lying was appropriate mostly because I think that lying is wrong. I think that the author might have done this on purpose just to have the reader prepare their own imaginative persona built up in their head one way or the other. I enjoyed the way that the author characterized all of the roles in Everday Use and thought it was a nice read.