Steinbeck Analysis a Deconstructionist Analysis Essay

Total Length: 550 words ( 2 double-spaced pages)

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She describes the transcendental experience of a starry night: "Every pointed star gets driven into your body. It's like that. Hot and sharp and -- lovely" (p. 345) It is a moment that shows the close connection of the painful and the sublime for Elisa, a connection that she understands perhaps because the brutal and tender nature of gardening.

The most profound contradiction in the story comes at the end, when we see her reaction to the stranger's callous treatment of her chrysanthemum shoots. Before she sees the chrysanthemums wilting on the side of the road, she is full of pride and awareness of her own strength as a woman, as a grower of things, and as a potential fixer of things. At the sight of the abandoned chrysanthemum shoots, however, that vision of herself crumbles.

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Her question to the husband about the violence of professional fighting suggests a desire in her to engage in violence herself, to inflict her rage and power on the world around her. Instead, she ends the story crying into her coat, "like an old woman" (p. 348).

The reader is left to ponder these contrasts and their implications for Elisa. While she is left in a moment of weakness and isolation at the end of the story, we wonder whether this is not actually a tale of triumph. Perhaps the world is working on her in the same "cold and tender" way that she herself tends her garden, pruning off old visions and assumptions to expose her to a new self......

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https://www.aceyourpaper.com/essays/steinbeck-analysis-deconstructionist-analysis-7811