During my reading of “The Management of Grief” by Bharati Mukherjee, I was able to connect so deeply within every passage written, and the dialogue between characters. As I read, I tried to imagine myself during the time of our tragic event on 9/11. It was not the exact tragedy that Bharati was describing, but it was the closest way for me to connect into the solid world she was trying to create within her style of writing. The passage that I pulled out for this blog post is the last one that ends the reading on page 985.

As we have learned in Charters’s “The Elements of Fiction” plot is the sequence of events in a story and their relation to one another as they develop and usually resolve a conflict. In the last passage of “The Management of Grief” it’s as if all the events including the bombing, the loss of relatives, the new reports, the identifying of the lost lives, the constant reminders of such a tragic moment had all come to a calm ending. The last passage certainly resolved the inner conflict that this young woman was facing throughout this tragic story, her inner being was being tested and finally she was able to bring it to an end. Bharati writes as “Your time has come”, they said. “Go be brave” , the style in which she writes this small mental and realistic dialogue shows us how the events of the plot led to us the audience understanding the main character in so much depth. We have all dealt with situations we may not have known how to deal with whether it may be a loss of a family member, or friend, and the events that take place before and after the loss takes a toll on one. Bharati allows us the audience to see that there is no rush or time frame for when it is time to move on. It’s the plot of events that allow us to determine how we will go on and how we will continue our lives once we have come to terms with what has occurred. “The Management of Grief” certainly allows us to get into more than just the plot to show Bharati’s great use of literary elements throughout this reading.

While I was reading A Good Man Is Hard To Find the question that come to my mind was why the grandmother does not have a name? The little girl June Star has a name, but the mother and the grandmother does not have a name. T

he grandmother plays a big rule in this story, she is the one who want the kids to see this house and she is the one who scared the cat when she realized she has directed Bailey to go the wrong way and causes the accident and got the whole family killed by the Misfit, but she does not have a name. O’Connor purposely not giving this major character a name because he believe a hypocrite and racist character like grandmother is common. It will be more significant to leave her unnamed and focus on the way this character would speak and dress.

The grandmother have the most dialogues in the story. O’Connor make sure the grandmother to express all her opinion to show the kind of shallow and mean person she is. “Little n___s in the country don’t have things like we do. If I could paint, I’d paint that picture.” the grandmother said when they pass by the shack with an African American child standing by it. She is surprise and pointing at the child like he is an animal at the zoo and using offensive word to describe him.

Before the family leave for their trip, O’Connor describe the grandmother’s attired very throughly ,”the grandmother had a navy blue straw sailor hat with a bunch of white violets on the brim and a navy blue dress with a small white dot in the print…in case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady.” This is a very strange metaphor to use for describing someone who is dress very nice and this line also foreshadow what is coming for the grandmother. She is a very vivid character, but with no name, O’Connor wants his reader to have a clear picture in their mind of this character, her characteristic is more important, the title of the person is not important.