Heritage, Identity, and War in Four Short Stories
This paper examines four short works of American fiction through the lens of identity, heritage, and coping with displacement. It analyzes Alice Walker's "Everyday Use," exploring how Dee's sudden embrace of African-American cultural artifacts reflects performative identity rather than genuine connection. It then considers Paul Berlin's psychological dissociation as a survival mechanism in O'Brien's "Going After Cacciato." The paper also interprets the symbolic bowl in Ann Beattie's "Janus" as a metaphor for surface-level identity and modern materialism, before concluding with Sandra Cisneros' portrayal of silence and female voice in "Woman Hollering Creek."
- Walker's 'Everyday Use': Heritage as Performance: Dee's performative embrace of African-American heritage
- O'Brien's 'Going After Cacciato': Dissociation and Survival: Paul Berlin's mental coping strategies in Vietnam
- Beattie's 'Janus': Materialism and Identity: Andrea's bowl as symbol of surface identity
- Cisneros' 'Woman Hollering Creek': Silence and Female Voice: Cleofilas' silence contrasted with Felice's freedom
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What makes this paper effective
- Each section maintains a clear central argument — the paper never summarizes plot without attaching interpretive meaning, keeping analysis front and center throughout.
- The paper draws on symbolic readings effectively, particularly the bowl in "Janus" and the howling woman in Cisneros, grounding abstract ideas in concrete textual objects.
- Transitions between works are clean, and each section is self-contained yet contributes to the broader theme of identity under pressure.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates thematic synthesis across unrelated texts. Rather than treating each story in isolation, the writer connects them through the overarching concern of authentic versus performed or suppressed identity — a skill central to comparative literary analysis at the undergraduate level.
Structure breakdown
The paper is organized as four discrete analytical paragraphs, each devoted to one literary work. Each paragraph identifies a central conflict or symbol, interprets its significance, and connects it to a broader cultural or psychological theme. The structure is consistent and reader-friendly, making the comparative intent clear even without an explicit framing introduction or conclusion.
Walker's 'Everyday Use': Heritage as Performance
Alice Walker's short story "Everyday Use" depicts the two very different life paths taken by the daughters of its narrator and protagonist, an unnamed mother. The older daughter, Dee, is a highly ambitious young woman; the mother notes at the beginning of the story that Dee always disdained hard, manual work in high school, along with any close association with her African-American family. Dee goes away to college, while her younger sister Maggie remains at home and embraces the domestic chores Dee once scorned.
However, when Dee returns from college, she has taken on a new identity and now presents herself as Afrocentric. All of the things she used to dislike — the hand-carved butter churn, her mother's hand-sewn quilts — are now "quaint" and part of her "heritage." The implication is that now that African-American culture has become trendy in mainstream white society, Dee is willing to play along and emphasize this aspect of her past in order to fit in and boost her self-image at college. Rather than appreciating the blood, sweat, toil, and tears that went into making the family's quilts, Dee wants to display them as artifacts — objects to be admired from a distance rather than used and lived with, as her mother and Maggie continue to do.
O'Brien's 'Going After Cacciato': Dissociation and Survival
The nonlinear format of "Night March," a chapter in Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato, is designed to reflect the coping mechanisms Paul Berlin uses to endure the harrowing experience of standing guard at night during the Vietnam War. Rather than confront the reality of facing death in the jungle, Berlin pretends he is a young boy camping with his father. Yet his mind cannot help but drift toward unpleasant thoughts, including the recent death of Doc Peret from a heart attack.
The story details how Paul relies throughout his service on a series of mental tricks: counting his steps and imagining he is earning a dollar bill for each one; rehearsing conversations with his father in which he insists that Vietnam is not so bad; and singing songs to himself. He imagines himself as separate and aloof from the other soldiers, living in a world of his own making. When Cacciato praises Paul's sense of humor, the moment underscores the central point — that the only way to stay sane in Vietnam is to completely dissociate from the horror of reality.
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