Narration of “Everyday Use”

"Everyday Use" is narrated by a woman who describes herself as “a large,

big-boned woman with rough, man-working hands” (Walker 654). She has enjoyed a rugged farming life in the country and now lives in a small, tin-roofed house surrounded by a clay yard in the middle of a cow pasture. The mother is a middle aged black woman who has not had or known a lot of money or assets, and never made it through second grade. “I never had an education myself. After second grade the school was closed down” (Walker 655). She lives with her younger daughter Maggie who also does not appear to have much of an education. Her older daughter Dee is away at college and likes to flaunt that fact that she is smart.

a lot, and her mother’s narration shows that Dee also has scars, but they are less visible than Maggie's.

Since the narrator is the mother, she is obviously engaged in the action and characters of the story and therefore changes the way information is revealed. Since this narrator is not omnipresent, she cannot tell the true thoughts and feelings of the characters, only what she thinks they are. For example, she describes Dee as someone who “washed us in a river of make-believe, burned us with a lot of knowledge…pressed us to her with the serious way she read, to shove us away at just the moment, like dimwits, we seemed about to understand” (Walker 655). This description does not make Dee about to be a perfect daughter, and she probably was not. Yet, this is only the narrator’s description that the audience reads. A narrator who really does not know why Dee acts the way she acts. Maybe the mother feels anger towards Dee for not seeming upset when the house burned down. “ I see her standing off under the sweet gum tree…a look of concentration on her face as she watched the last dingy gray board of the house fall in toward the red-hot brick chimney. Why don’t you do a dance around the ashes? I’d wanted to ask her. She had hated the house that much” (Walker 655). This incident could have changed the mother’s opinion of her daughter in which case would change

Some topics in this essay:
Maggie Read, Alice Walker’s, walker 655, black woman, characters example, “everyday use”, mother’s narration, information revealed, flat character, daughter dee, mother children, daughter maggie,