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Cherry Bomb By Maxine Clair Essay

512 Words3 Pages

The excerpt from Maxine Clair’s story “Cherry Bomb” represents a child's world interpreted from the viewpoint of an adult. Maxine Claire also uses figurative language, symbolism, thematic parallels, and variations of tone in order to represent a more sophisticated grownup perception of her childhood memories of her fifth grade summer world. However despite the complex language involved, Maxine Clair still maintains the innocent, naive, childish viewpoint of her summer memories in this excerpt. The first paragraph of the excerpt demonstrates this naive viewpoint through the emphasis of an almost childlike demonstration of language when she describes “That Midwest Summer broke records straight over-one-hundred-degree days in July, Mr. Calhoun still came with that-old-thing of an ice truck.” This section of the excerpt represents this naive view of Clair’s summer because she used the word “thing” in order to emphasize this viewpoint by demonstrating a limited knowledge of the ice truck that Mr. Calhoun came around with. Not only does the language demonstrate this effect of a child like viewpoint, the variations in tone also demonstrate this type of view …show more content…

Since symbolism takes place as an object represented multiple times as a figure with symbolic meaning, then the cherry bomb takes place as a form of symbolism. The cherry bomb characterizes itself as a memory of Eddy because Clair describes how the cherry bomb reminds her of Eddy because “After Eddy’s accident, he gave me a cherry bomb. His last. I kept it in my cigar box as a sort of memento of good times.” The cherry bomb demonstrates this symbolic meaning because Clair tagged the cherry bomb with her memories of “good times” with Eddy. Altogether the cherry bomb has a symbolic meaning because Clair values the cherry bomb more than it actually is worth because she cherished the cherry bomb as an icon of one of her fondest memories of

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