The Day They Burned The Books Summary

narrator, authors are wont to employ slang or childish jargon, and even lexical quirks. Wherever the vocabulary of a child fails to voice the character’s thoughts, authors are given to either coining, in the manner that C. S Lewis did, or to use metaphors and simile like Twain does. One may find a good example of some of this extraordinary vocabulary and neologisms in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man whose opening sentence reads:
“Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo…” (Joyce, 3)
The effect such transferred epithets and neologisms have on the reader not only strengthen the illusion

The story’s narrator is a 12 year old unnamed girl who is the protagonist- Eddie’s companion and good friend. Eddie’s father, Mr. Sawyer, is a white man whose profession is unknown and who is also not a gentleman. People on the island do not know what he does for a living, and as the narrator re-iterates, “the point is that he is not a gentleman.” Eddie’s mother, Mrs. Sawyer, is a “coloured” woman who is at the receiving end of her husband’s, frequent, drunken racially laden abuse. Shortly before Mr. Sawyer’s death, he has a violent outburst during a party where he pulls Mrs. Sawyer’s hair to prove it is not a wig. Later she is seen putting the hair he had pulled out in an envelope. This has “obeah” or mystical properties and the narrator finds this to be an important detail that Mr. Sawyer should be aware of. Just after her twelfth birthday Mr. Sawyer is found dead, the cause of death is not known and at the funeral the townspeople commend Mrs. Sawyer for “walking like a queen behind the coffin” and shedding tears at the right time, almost as though she were enacting the role of a grieving wife