Essay | Obasan: Changing the Past with Perspective and Style

In Joy Kogawa's novel Obasan, the author's changing perspective and style presents the author's past memories with different attitudes.

In Kogawa's first passage, Kogawa implements metaphoric language and first person plural perspective creating coherency and emotion in the passage. Lines such as "we are the scholarly and the illiterate, the envied and the ugly, the fierce and the docile" (Kogawa ln.19-21), give the reader the sense of desolation and suffering. The reader feels more of the emotion because the metaphoric language helps the reader to understand the author's feelings and relate her experiences to the reader's own past. Because of the fact that the metaphoric language implicitly compares Kogawa's feelings and emotions to an improbable situation, Kogawa helps her reader to profoundly understand a past that he or she has never experienced, making it possible for her readers to be farther involved in her past. Also, in the first...
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