Thanks, To All The Little People

5 Pages 1357 Words

Thanks, To All the Little People

In every story there is always a main character that catches the reader’s eye. Even in the child’s storybook: Clifford the Big Red Dog, Clifford is the main character that always gets into trouble. But what differs children’s stories from adult stories is use of minor characters. In The Lesson, by Toni Cade Bambara, the minor characters within the story define the main character Sylvia. Those characters help us understand Sylvia greatly by their reactions towards her and how she describes them in the narrative. We would never be able to fully analyze Sylvia without observing how she to all that is going on around her. Sylvia is the main focus of the story also because she is narrator. But if any of the other characters were to tell the story we would get a whole different point of view and a whole different story.
Miss Moore and Sugar are the main examples to presenting Sylvia’s jealousy to the reader. Sylvia acts as if she doesn’t care about her poverty, but Miss Moore brings out a major detail that shows the reader that deep down it’s killing her to see all the people that are better than her.
Sylvia acts as though she couldn’t care any less about Miss Moore and the white people of the richer part of Manhattan. She makes fun of Miss Moore and sees her actions only as showing off what she doesn’t have. She laughs at the white people who wore stockings and fur coats in the summer. She sees them as crazy for paying all this money for toys when they can go down a few blocks to Pop’s and save a couple hundred dollars.
Sylvia is not as proud of being underprivileged, as she seems to act to be. One of Sylvia’s major actions that show us that she is jealous of all the richer people is how angry she gets when she sees all the toys that she cannot afford in the toy store. Also she curses a great deal of the story. Sylvia expresses her anger at other by cursing and...