Text and contexts11/2/2022 ![]() #1 The negative effect the environment can have on the individual is shown in Morrison’s comparison of marigolds in the ground to people in the environment. Although varying in length, each of the last seven sentences of the paragraph begins with the subject “She” and an active verb such as “rode,” “walked,” “took,” “grasp” and “ran.” The section is choppy, repetitive and yet clear, as if to reinforce Ruth’s unconscious insistence on movement as a means of coping with the difficulties of her life. ![]() Even McBride’s sentence structure in the paragraph about his mother’s running supports the effectiveness of her spurts of action without reflection. Discrete moments of action preserve her sense of her own strength and offer her new alternatives for the future. Movement provides the solution, although a temporary one, and preserves her sanity. ![]() The image of running that McBride uses here and elsewhere supports his understanding of his mother as someone who does not stop and consider what is happening in her life yet is able to move ahead. As an adult, she continues this pattern, although her running is modified by her responsibilities to her children and home. She did not analyze the connections between pain and understanding, between action and response, even though she seems to understand them. Instead she just left home, moved on, tried something different. As a girl, she did not sit and think about her abusive father and her trapped life in the Suffolk store. Ruth’s motion is a pattern of responding to the tragedy in her life. She ran, as she had done most of her life, but this time she was running for her own sanity” (164). As she biked, walked, rode the bus all over the city, “she kept moving as if her life depended on it, which in some ways it did. Following her second husband’s death, James points out that, “while she weebled and wobbled and leaned, she did not fall. As an adult, Ruth still feels the urge to run. Ruth herself describes that, even as a young girl, she had an urge to run, to feel the freedom and the movement of her legs pumping as fast as they can (42). While James turns inward, his mother Ruth turns outward, starting a new relationship, moving to a different place, keeping herself busy. Sample analysis paragraphs from James McBride’s The Color of WaterĪn important difference between James and his mother is their method of dealing with the pain they experience.
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