The Flowers
By Alice Walker

The story is about a girl named Myop. She is ten years old and lives in a sharecropper cabin with her family. They live in the country where maize is grown cotton, peanuts and squash. They have a lot of farm animals and a forest in their backyard. In autumn the mother usually takes her out and collects nuts. Myop lives a wonderful and carefree life. Myop have explored the woods many times before, but one day she turns her back to the rusty sharecropper to explore the forest on her way. She finds ferns, leaves and strange blue flowers and a sweet suds bush. She gets farther and farther away from home and she thinks it's a little creepy and uncomfortable in the cove she ended up in. She describes it as "the air was damp, the silence close and deep." Suddenly she steps on something. A corpse of a man. Beside him a pink rose lay on the ground. The rose has something around the roots it turns out to be rotten remains of a tattered plowline. A last Myop lie down the blossoms and the story ends with the words "and the summer was over.”

It is an omniscient narrator in third person narrative. Because the narrator knows what the girl thinks and feels without direct expression in the text. We follow the girl and her achievements seen from outside when the viewpoint is an external perspective. It makes the story neutral and you keep getting the exterior of knowledge, but not the interior. Therefore it forces us to even think what Myop thinks. And why she thinks so.

The story takes place in a forest. Myop and her family live in a sharecropper cabin med rusty boards and it may symbolize poverty. They live in the country probably because they have chickens and a pigpen. Around the spring it’s also described how they fetch water from the river. I believe that history could take place in a country in South America or Africa, as it is described that Myop has a brown hand and how she feels light and warmth of the sun. The season is summer because the sun warms her and the harvest is coming to an end. There are a lot of details in the text, for example are the colors and varieties of flowers described.
I think the story is about the transition from childhood to adulthood and that this trip may not go too fast. To me it seems that history is divided into two sections. In the first part of the story is all very positive and the world is depicted as light and warm, like the sun. The first section ends as she moves her from her familiar surroundings. But it is turning around at twelve o’clock like in Cinderella. It is here that she is supposed to grow up and she finds out that everything is not bright and good, but there is also a more gloomy side of the world. She seems very independent as she takes a decision to go into the wood that day. This shows that something must happen. It amazes me that she is not afraid or scared when she discovers the corpse. Only when she sees that he could have been murdered from his tooth appearance, she is surprised. Not far from the corpse, she finds a pink rose that has a noose tied around the root. When she sees the remains of another piece of rope hanging from a tree, she lies down the flowers she has gathered beside the dead man and the last sentence reads "and the summer was over." I think it symbolizes that she puts her childhood behind her. Perhaps the story could be about the author's own experiences with vintage from child to adult.
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