LO 5) Unit 3.1 Discussion – Short Story Analysis using Literary Devices

Purpose: This post will be an exercise in finding textual examples of Literary Devices that prove what we are saying about the meaning or overarching theme(s) of the story.

Tasks:

Part 1. Choose one of the short stories that we have read so far. Remember that “Everything that Rises Must Converge” was only provided as a model; you must choose one of the other stories to write about:

“Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience (TM)”
“The Paper Menagerie”
“Badeye”
Part 2. Discuss why and how the story connects with one or two of the themes discussed in Unit 1:

Love (filial, maternal/paternal, romantic, or platonic)
Alienation/Otherness
The American Dream/Nightmare
The Quest for Identity/Coming of Age
Conformity/Rebellion
Use specific details from the text, including the use of irony, metaphor, and symbolism, to support your point. Approach this as preparation for your essay in this Unit.

Part 3. Respond to at least 2 of your classmates’ posts. Your initial post should consist of at least 2 complete and well-written paragraphs, and your replies should be thoughtful and substantive.

Grading Criteria:

Your choice of theme or themes is well-supported by your textual examples.
Your explanation and engagement of your chosen quotations.
Your peer responses are substantive and thoughtful and advance the discussion by introducing new insights or perspectives, and/or significantly deepening or broadening the conversation with questions (Avoid generalized comments such as “good post” or “I agree”).
Your use of language: your writing should be clear, well-organized, and free from spelling and grammar errors. The post represents your original thinking unless otherwise indicated.
“Badeye”

by Ron Rash (2014)

I remember Badeye Carter. I remember his clear eye, the patch, the serpent tattooed on his shoulder, the long, black fingernails. I remember his black ’49 Ford pickup, the rusty cowbell dangling from the sideview mirror, the metal soft drink chest in the back filled with shaved ice, the three gallon jars of flavoring—cherry, lemon, and licorice, the Hav-a-Tampa cigar box he kept his money in. I remember how he always came that summer at bullbat time, those last moments of daylight when the streetlight in our neighborhood came on and the bats began to swoop, preying on moths attracted to the glow.
That summer was the longest of my life. Time seemed to sleep that summer.
Sometimes a single afternoon seemed a week. June was an eternity. It must have seemed just as endless for my mother, for this was the summer when my obsession with snakes reached its zenith, and our house seemed more a serpentarium than a home. And then there was Badeye, to my mother just as slippery, and as dangerous.
I was eight years old. Every evening when I heard the clanging of the cowbell, I ran to the edge of the street, clutching the nickel I had begged from my father earlier that day. I never asked my mother. To her Badeye was an intruder, a bringer of tooth decay, bad eating habits, and other things.
Every other mother in Cliffside felt the same way, would refuse to acknowledge Badeye’s hat-tipping “how you doing, ma’ams” as he stopped his truck in front of their houses. They would either stare right at him with a look colder than anything he ever put in his paper cones, as my mother did, or, like our next door neighbor Betty Splawn, turn her back to him and walk into the house.
Their reasons for disliking Badeye went beyond his selling snowcones to their children. They knew, as everyone in Cliffside knew, that while Badeye was new to the snowcone business, he had been the town’s bootlegger for over a decade. Being hard-shell Southern Baptists, these women held him responsible for endangering their husbands’ eternal souls with his moonshine brought up from Scotland County.
There was also the matter of his right eye, which had been blinded ten years earlier when Badeye’s wife stabbed him with an ice pick as he slept. Badeye had not pursued charges, and the ex–Mrs. Carter had not explained her motivation before heading to Alabama

to live with a sister, leaving the women of Cliffside to wonder what he must have done to deserve such an awakening.
Cliffside’s fathers viewed Badeye more sympathetically. They tended to believe his snowcones would cause no lasting harm to their children, sometimes even eating one themselves. As for the bootlegging, some of these men were Badeye’s customers, but even those who did not drink, such as my father, felt Badeye was a necessary evil in a town where the nearest legal alcohol was fifteen miles away. These men also realized that each of them had probably done something during their years that warranted an icepick in the eye.
Badeye’s right eye had died for all their sins.

So it was our fathers we went to, waiting until our mothers were washing the supper dishes or otherwise occupied. Our fathers would fish out nickels from the pants pockets, trying not to jingle the change too loudly, listening, like us, for the sound of our mothers’ approaching footsteps.
Badeye always stopped between our house and the Splawns’. Donnie Splawn, who was my age, his younger brother, Robbie, and I would gather around the tailgate of Badeye’s truck, our bare feet burning on the still-hot pavement. Sometimes we would be joined by another child, one who had gotten his nickel only after Badeye had passed by his house, forced to chase the truck through the darkening streets, finally catching up with him in front of our houses. It was worth it—that long, breathless run we had all made at some time when our mothers had not washed the dishes right away or when we had been playing and did not hear the cowbell until too late—because Badeye’s snowcones tasted better than anything we’d ever sunk our teeth into.
Donnie and I were partial to cherry, while Robbie liked lemon best. Donnie and Robbie tended to suck the syrup out of their snowcones, while I let the syrup in mine pool in the bottom of the paper cone, a last, condensed gulp so flavorful that it brought tears to my eyes.

Our mothers tried to fight back. They first used time-honored scare tactics, handed down from mother to daughter for generations. My mother’s version of the “trip to the dentist with snowcone-rotted teeth” horror story was vividly rendered, but while it did cause me to brush my teeth more frequently for a while, it did not slow my snowcone consumption. The story’s only lasting impact on me was a lifelong fear of dentists.
When my mother realized this conventional story had failed, she assumed the cause was overexposure, that stories, like antibiotics, tended to become less effective on children the more they were used, so she came up with a new story, one unlike any heard in the