The word 'protagonist' means the principal character in a play or in a story. In Alice Walker's poignant short story "Everyday Use" the protagonist is the mother of Maggie and Dee.
She is the narrator and the focaliser of the story and everything that happens in the story is told to us by her and we see everything from her perspective, consequently she is the most important character or the protagonist in the story.
Most significantly,it is the mother who decides that Maggie and not Dee who must be given the quilts which had been stitched by the grandmother of the girls. At the end of the story the mother snatches the quilts from Dee's (Miss Wangero) hands and gives it to Maggie:
I looked at her hard. She had filled her bottom lip with checkerberry snuff and gave her face a kind of dopey, hangdog look. It was Grandma Dee and Big Dee who taught her how to quilt herself. She stood there with her scarred hands hidden in the folds of her skirt. She looked at her sister with something like fear but she wasn't mad at her. This was Maggie's portion. This was the way she knew God to work.
When I looked at her like that something hit me in the top of my head and ran down to the soles of my feet. Just like when I'm in church and the spirit of God touches me and I get happy and shout. I did some.thing I never done before: hugged Maggie to me, then dragged her on into the room, snatched the quilts out of Miss Wangero's hands and dumped them into Maggie's lap. Maggie just sat there on my bed with her mouth open.
It is this decisive act of the mother by which she asserts her authority and proves that she sympathizes with Maggie, which marks her out as the protagonist of the story.
No comments:
Post a Comment