Many people take a leap of faith sometimes during their life and it could result in a life or death situation. Fear constantly takes over our lives and our decisions. The short story, “The Leap” by Louise Erdrich, is the story of a daughter doing her duty to help her mother, who is growing older, because she had saved her daughter’s life many times. Imagine yourself trying to cross a rickety old bridge and there is someone that is in trouble on the other side. Do you cross it and risk your life to help someone else, or do you let fear get the best of you?
To begin with, “The Leap” uses tone to convey different moods that the characters possess. In the beginning of the story, the author uses a cheerful tone while explaining the background of…show more content… A conflict is an inherent incompatibility between two objectives of two or more forces or characters (wikipedia.com). Conflicts can be internal, external or both. Anna has many conflicts that are internal because she has to decide whether to help herself or help the other people around her and is forced to choose between life and death. In the circus tragedy, she had to decide whether to save herself and her unborn child, or to save her husband. She knew that she had to save her unborn child and herself instead of her husband. During the fire, Anna made a heroic move by helping her daughter out of the burning house. This was an internal conflict that Anna faced because she had to choose whether to save her daughter’s life or not help at all. A flashback is an interruption of the chronological sequence of an event or earlier occurrence (literarydevices.net). Louise Erdrich uses flashback in her work for “The Leap” because the whole story is written as a flashback of the narrator, who is Anna’s daughter. There were two main flashbacks written into the story; the accident that cost Anna her first child, and when Anna saved her daughter from their burning
