Alice Walker, the author best known for her work in her award winning novel, The Color Purple, brings the reader to a different light of her life in this short story. I had not previously known that Alice Walker was blind in one eye. I have read The Color Purple and enjoyed the story tremendously. Obviously, a person with one correctly working eye can produce the same if not better writing than someone with two eyes, however, it always makes people take a step back when they learn of someone being different. To Walker's credit, she shows a lot of courage and determination in becoming a successful writer, even after her getting shot in the eye by a BB gun when she was eight. Throughout the short story, Walker describes a series of vignettes, all of which pertain to her eye. As was the case in The Color Purple, Walker's work flowed so smoothly and made it a very easy read. One particular vignette of Walker's that stuck out to me was the final one in the story.
Before beginning each of her vignettes, Walker starts with the phrase, "I remember:". However, on her final entry, she begins with, "But mostly, I remember this:". As the reader, that phrase made me significantly more drawn in to see what the topic of this vignette would be. The final short story did not leave me disappointed, and it actually left me closing the book with a good feeling about Alice Walker in general. In the story she talks about herself as a twenty-seven year old. At this point in time she has a baby daughter nearing the age of three. Walker tells the reader that her daughter is fascinated by a show on television entitled, Big Blue Marble. As Walker already explained in an earlier vignette, when she had the surgery to remove the blotch in her eye, it left her with a blue area in her eye, resembling that of a marble. Her daughter, oblivious to Walker's past, exclaims, "Mommy, there's a world in your eye." After hearing this, Walker states that "for the most part, the pain left then." Alice Walker is a remarkable story and a stellar author. I truly enjoyed reading her story and look forward to doing the paper in response to this in the near future.
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I'm glad you enjoyed this essay. For your own body collage, you might consider what techniques to use to tie your vignettes together--much like Walker has done here with the repeated phrase of "I remember," which she then alters toward the end in order to create emphasis where she'd like us to see it, as you have observed. You can certainly consider borrowing this technique in a way that will be relevant to your own essay. Experiment with some ideas and see where it takes you.
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