Loss Of Innocence In Alice Walker's The Flowers

Words: 360
Pages: 2

“And the summer was over”, implies that Myop, the main character of Alice Walker’s short story “The Flowers”, has lost her innocence by seeing the dead man and paying homage to him. No longer an ignorant child incognizant of death and the awful actions and intentions of mankind, she is graphically shocked out of her daze. Walker says that “often, in late autumn, her mother took her [to the woods].” The woods signify winter. In the summer there is none of the cynicism and hardships that plague winter nights. When it “seemed gloomy”, winter was setting in, foreshadowing the death Myop would witness. In the summer sun, Myop “felt light and good.” She could not see the consequences of actions, and was working out “the beat of the song,” as if