The Stone Diaries | Themes & Symbolism

The Stone Diaries Significant Topics

The Ordinary Life

For the most part, Daisy's life was the average life of a woman living in her time in America. This is also true of nearly all of the characters in the book. Cuyler worked in the quarry, Mercy was a housewife, and Barker Flett spent his day-to-day life studying and teaching about plants. Nearly every one of these characters, though, wishes for something more grand. Daisy, for one, goes to great lengths to find ways to augment the story of her life. One way in which Daisy achieves this is through omission. When telling her story, Daisy makes great leaps in time to vault herself from one large event to the next. The story of her birth is certainly the most remarkable story of her life, and each significant event seems to get smaller over her lifetime. Still, she chooses to specifically tell about these more attention-grabbing times, even down...
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