As you grow, you learn. About your surroundings, your family, the world and yourself. In this short story, we learn about a young girl as she tells her story with youthful perspective and unique insight.“This is my mother: as the questions go on, she takes from her pocket document after document as if they will support my right to attend school, as if she had been saving them up for this moment” when she observes this situation, she can pick up on only what is visually shown to her. So then would a child know of world rank and race, or of their own parents? If the narration in this book were factual, what would the girl at five know about her surrounding world and the ecosystem of her own home? The first day by Edward p. Jones is a short story …show more content…
Jones uses the plot structure in media res to describe a child's understanding of their parents over the time as they grow up and experience similar hardships. In the very first sentence, the theme is brought up in a vague way. “Long before I learned to be ashamed of my mother.” This tells the reader the story is written when the narrator is older and looking back at her life and her mother's actions. It also states she is ashamed of her mother but at the time of the story taking place, she was young enough to accept her mother without condition because she didn't know any better. Having it written in media res sets the stage to tell us the reader that at some point the narrator became ashamed of their mother. This helps concrete the idea of the young narrator's innocence and her ignorance of her mother's flaws. This is why it is so important this story is written in past tense. Without it, we would not receive the context we need to make conclusions about her and her mother's relationship after a rollercoaster of a day. As the narrator is poking fun of her sister, she lets a remark fly she heard another child call her neighbors. “When I say the word in fun to one of my sisters, my mother slaps me across the mouth and the word is lost to me for years” it is obviously implied the young girl repeated the N-word. When her mother hears the derogatory term she was clearly dutifully angry, but at the time the narrator wasn't aware of the N-words power and meaning. She likely didn't understand why her mother had hit her, and she may have begun to resent her in that moment. It is not until she is much older she realizes why her mother acted the way she did. “The word is lost to me for years and years.” She came back to her memory of the day to understand her mother's perspective on the situation. It is important this detail was written in media res because without that information we would not know she later learned what it meant. Though it is