Everyday Use

1 Pages 361 Words

Everyday Use

In Alice Walker’s, Everyday Use, the point of view is that of the mother’s. She is the narrator. She is also what we’d call a protagonist. A hero in a way. She is telling the story from her perspective, so we see her children the way she sees them. As with most stories, there is a protagonist and an antagonist. In this story, the antagonist is Dee, the narrator’s oldest daughter. Dee does her own thing and is a bit of a rebel. Perhaps just an average African American teenager of the 1970’s, trying to find her place in the world, but her mother thinks differently. She sees Dee as a rebellious teen, and sometimes dreams of having one of those T.V. mother-daughter relationships with her daughter. As with any protagonist/antagonist relationships, the antagonist creates a problem for the protagonist. Dee creates a problem for her mother by the way she begins to act around her new boyfriend and in other ways. Dee decides to change her name, and her mother is okay with it. She knows that she has a problem saying “no” to Dee, or at least that’s the way she said Maggie sees it. Then, when it comes to the quilts, Dee who once said she didn’t want to quilts because they were “old fashioned” has now decided she wants them, to hang up, to represent her heritage and that Maggie wouldn’t or couldn’t appreciate them. When characters change, it causes conflict, and that is exactly what happens when the Mother decides to finally stand up for herself and she says “No” to Dee. She gives the quilts to Maggie and tells Dee to take one or two of the other ones. Dee has a problem with this, obviously because the world has never said “no” to her, and along with her new name, new style, and new outlook on life, she experienced a new word, and it didn’t make her very happy. For once, the mother could sit back and be proud of the way she handled something....