The anecdotes A Good Man is Hard to Find and The Comforts of Home will be examined with respect to color

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8 May 2005

English 11 SL

Flannery O'Conner - Color Connotations

The anecdotes A Good Man is Hard to Find and The Comforts of Home will be examined with respect to color connotation and imagery. This essay will discuss how colors affect the reader's abstract senses and emotions. Colors are also used to suggest the nature of the piece and characters within. Various cultures perceive colors differently which could change a reader's perspective.

A Good Man is Hard to Find is told from the grandmother's point of view. The first significant color is describing her son's wife. "... a young woman is slacks, whose face was as broad and innocent as a cabbage and was tied around with a green head-kerchief that had two points on top like rabbit's ears." The use of this color is ambiguous. It could be construed as either positive or negative. The positive is that it may be suggesting the woman's youth, fertility and vigor. The negative connotation is the grandmother's jealousy and envy towards her youthfulness. There is apparent animosity between the two. When the grandmother suggests visiting Tennessee "The children's mother didn't seem to hear her..." The grandmother never speaks directly to the mother. She repeatedly refers to the woman's attire with a definite manner of superiority.
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"[The next day] the children's mother still had on slacks and still had her head tied up in a green kerchief, but the grandmother had on a navy blue straw sailor hat with a bunch of white violets on the brim and a navy blue dress with small white dots in the print. Her collars and cuffs with white organdy trimmed with lace and at her neckline she had pinned a purple spray of cloth violets containing a sachet. In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on a highway would know at once that she was ...

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