The Country of Pointed Firs Essay -- Literary Analysis

The Country of Pointed Firs transcends the boundaries of a traditional taradiddle in attempt to grasp the realism of the country landscape in a more generous motley. The book contains little to no drama, unless instead focuses on description of dialect, landscape, and gesture. The narrator meditates upon the unchanged time of Dunnet come to describe the quality of landscape and permanence in scenes of country life. Her trip out serves as a revaluation of continuancea fixed type of social order and existence within the crossroads community. Furthermore, the narrators outsider berth justifies the practice of defining characters in external conditions. The Country of Pointed Firs is written in local color containing character portraits and genre scenes. Local color, in a sniff out, is a miniature form of literature in which the writer workings with anecdote and caricature. Incidentally humor derives from occurrences of real life. The local color form is appropriate to the nat ure of the narrators experience of country life in Dunnet Landing. Jewetts ar cardinalrk of perspective informs her pictorial style with a deeply refined sense of texture. The reader is made to feel the narrators final judgments in the closing chapter of The reflexive View, which states an end of the narrators return to Dunnet Landing. The concluding scene is a moment of valediction between the narrator and Dunnet Landing as she stands at the crossing of two pathsthe village life and the city to which she must return. The narrator sits upon a heap and over catchs her surroundings, closely observing Mrs. Todd whose distant figure looked mateless and appealing (129). Mrs. Todds attitude of sorrow and isolation reveals deeper insights into her character. Though Mrs. Todd earlier ... ...n Mrs. Todd came back and found her boarder gone. So we die before our own eyes so we see some chapters of our lives come to their natural end (129). The closed and quiet pass of village life has c ome to a swift end. The narrator departs as the tide sets in, leaving Dunnet Landing in its air of isolated stillness. The narrators on the button observations allow the reader to find insight in small moments of village life. Jewett presents a world seemingly unchanged with a mixture of farawayness and a childish certainty of being the center of civilization (1). The narrators nostalgic recount of village life has about it the mood of a dream, a life remembered and not put down until long afterwards. Jewetts pictorial conventions cause a feeling of impermanence akin to nostalgia assembled into long, gracefully rambled sentences authenticating her own regional style.