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Imagery And Diction In Alice Walker's 'The Flowers'

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Alice Walker uses imagery and diction throughout her short story to tell the reader the meaning of “The Flowers”. The meaning of innocence lost and people growing up being changed by the harshness of reality. The author is able to use the imagery to show the difference between innocence and the loss of it. The setting is also used to show this as well. Alice walker uses diction to convey the loss of innocence in this short story. Using diction such as “She struck out at random at chickens she liked” to convey innocence at the beginning of the story. However she starts using different diction towards the end to convey the loss of that innocence. With lines like “The air was damp and silence was close” and “It was then she stepped smack into his eyes” and “It was only when she saw his naked grin that she gave a little yelp of …show more content…

The imagery had much light and childishness to it. With images such as “it seemed to Myop as she skipped lightly from her house to pigpen to smokehouse that the days had never been as beautiful as these”. As well as having lines such as “she felt light and good in the warm sun”, and “She struck out at random at chickens she liked” to create the feeling of child hood innocence, using all of this light to mean goodness and being unaffected by the harshness of reality. However she also uses the imagery later to show the loss of innocence when she describes everything as darker, when she starts using lines such as “it seemed gloomy in the little clove she found herself in” and “all his cloths had rotted away”. Alice walker is using this imagery to convey that the innocence has been lost at this point, taken by the harshness of reality and death. The imagery is also used to prepare the reading for the end with the line “the air was damp, the silence close and deep”. This line showing that death was near and soon after finding this Myop comes across a dead

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