Death
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Death has significant purposes on the story and narrator in No Name Woman, The Man Who Was Almost a Man, and Neighbor Rosicky. Each story had its own meaning for death. The narrator or main character in each story relayed this same meaning of death, or showed another significant outlook to death.
In No Name Woman, the death of the aunt was significant to the story to show the effects of shame in a culture. The aunt killed her baby and then herself after becoming pregnant in an affair because of the village. The village people found out about her pregnancy and on the night she was giving birth they terrorized her family and ruined the house (Kingston 2558). The death of the aunt was also significant to the narrator. The narrator was coming of age so her mother told her the story to warn her, “Now that you have started to menstruate, what happened to her could happen to you” (Kingston 2559).
In The Man Who Was Almost a Man, the death of Jenny was significant to the story and to the main character Dave. The death of Jenny was important to the story and Dave to show the idea of adolescence being caught in between childhood and adulthood. Dave was supposed to be plowing with Jenny, but he played around with his gun instead. The symbol for manhood presented in the story was the gun. He accidentally shot Jenny because he did not really know how to use the gun like most children. His ignorance of shooting her was to show that he was still childlike. He then let her bleed to death without going to tell anyone which was also ignorant and childlike (Wright 2261-62).
In Neighbor Rosicky, death had a completely different meaning. In the story, Rosicky’s death was significant in that it was a way for Rosicky to stay in the calm country setting. Rosicky loved the country atmosphere where he could live off of the land. In his death, he was buried next to his land as if his spirit could watch over his family and the open country. The story was told in third person, but it seemed like there was significance placed on Dr. Ed at the