Alice Walker's Beauty: When The Other Dancer Is The Self

Alice Walker’s story “Beauty: When The Other Dancer Is The Self” is a personal narrative telling about her life from the time she was two and half until she was a mother at the age of twenty-seven. She tells about being the favorite, most loved, pretty little girl at the age of two and then changing into a tomboy at the age of eight. When she was eight years old she was out playing with her older brothers, and then something happened that changed her entire perspective in life. One of her brothers shot her right in the eye with one of their BB guns. Walker goes from being a confident child to a self-conscious and little girl. Throughout the next twenty or so years she tells about why she feels she has changed until one day, at the age of twenty seven, she realizes that she loves her eye and it is nothing to be ashamed of; it is a part of her and that is never going to change. Throughout this story Walker does an amazing job of using imagery to create the story in the reader’s mind, repetition to put emphasis on important points, using narration to hook the reader into the story and make them feel as if they are a part

Several times in her essay she tells of how different she feels after she is shot in the eye but time after time she is told “You did not change” (37). This is a big deal to Walker because she knows for a fact that she is not the same little girl that she used to be and she is “eight, and for the first time, doing poorly in school, where [she has] been something of a whiz since [she] was four” (36). It is like her life has been completely turned upside down and nothing it going the way that it should be. Repeating the line “You did not change” over and over in Walker’s story shows how much this line meant to her growing up and how much it still means to her now. In the same manner that this line effects Alice, it now has a similar effect on her