Midterm Writing test Part B

Wrap-up activities

10.

First, The author puts the reader in a simple regular everyday situation for him to identify to the story. She wants to capture his attention for the eventual dramatic turn out. She associates bread with a pleasure of life, describing clearly the fact that you ate it with appetite. She starts out the story with the word ''imagine'' that will be repeated each time she changes the circumstances. She insists on the fact that making bread is for you a relaxing thing you often enjoy. She describes a simple action we do mostly everyday that doesn't mean anything to us. She wants to make us remember the pleasure of eating peanut butter honey bread.

Then, she transports you into the dramatic context of famine, keeping the bread as the main stake. She defines you as a poor person living in a slum with a younger sister starving to death. The author clearly defines that you are sleeping on a thin mattress and that the walls are made out of dried earth to make you empathize with the situation. After, she imposes you an ultimatum; give the bread to your starving sister, or keep it to yourself. Here again, the bread is the main element that will make all the difference. She wants you to think about the banality of the bread for you and the importance of it for the starving poor people. She starts of the paragraph with the word believe to really make you imagine it could happen to you.

To conclude, we clearly see that Margaret Atwood uses the bread as an introspection tool. She makes you identify, then she confronts you with a situation you usually want to avoid and forget. She denounces our capitalist and our self-minded thinking compared to the distressed starving people living in poor conditions that as nothing but bread. Then she makes you believe that the bread might be an hallucination to give it importance it deserves.The story is wrote as if the author is personally speaking to you. This makes you imagine yourself beeing confronted to these situation.