In "Brownies," the short story from the book "Drinking Coffee Elsewhere" by Z.Z. Packer, Packer uses quotes to personalize what is going on at Woodrow Wilson elementary. She uses anecdotes to describe whey all the girls were laughing so hard. They laughed hard because they thought the use of big words that they didn't know was funny, especially the word Caucasain.
Packer sets the scene in the first few pages piece by piece. Instead devoting a page to explaining the situation, she strings the reader along. She put in a bit about the troop girls, follow it up by talking about religion, and then she goes into how Woodrow Wilson is a school in South Atlanta that is almost entirely African American.
She uses dialogue to show what the group of girls of thinking of doing after someone of non-African American descent called another girl a nigger. The girls all give their ideas of what to do in a round robin discussion.
I like how I don't know the protagonists name after the first few pages. The only way we know the protagonist is as "snot," the name a fellow-girl gave to her when she was in the first grade, which was another anecdote.
Monday, October 25, 2010
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