Literary Analysis The Bonesetter's Daughter

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Analyzing “How to Read Literature like a Professor” is easy, but on the other hand, to analyze “The Bonesetter’s Daughter” is a consuming task. The difficulty doesn’t lie in the grammar or the structure, but in employing the skills employed by Foster’s book. An unskilled reader would assume that Amy Tan’s novel: The Bonesetter’s Daughter, is just another novel written for entertainment purposes. To an untrained reader, there seems to be no author’s intent to use literary devices that would contextualize the deeper meaning that is usually found in fiction, mythology, and folklore. Instead the novel would seem nothing more than entertainment, but for a reader that isn’t just reading but also searching through the text for the literary devices …show more content…

Jazz, it’s groovy, its rich, and its improvised, or maybe it isn’t. All jazz solo’s follow a planned beat, maintain a tempo and rhythm that surrounds the individuals solo and stays constant through the different instruments and song. Therefor the improvised notes are to a degree preplanned, follow the same tempo and are meant to lead to the same conclusion. Similarly, Amy Tan is almost all over the place, writing in the present, the past, the possible future, taking the reader through her work, her mothers work, through different worries and dilemma’s, and yet no matter how unrelated or off topic they may seem to one another, her writing is following a tempo, a rhythm that stays constant through her different stories. The rhythm employed by Amy Tan leads to one single resolution, one big musical and smooth finale that ties up all the stories and loose ends in her novel. Yet similar to jazz, the rhythm of her book is hard to identify, because the reader is sucked into the story too much to pay attention to the inner-message and literary …show more content…

But a woman’s heart, a heart drawn out of sadness, the dead heart that gave shape to the world. “A particular beginning results in a particular end”. Messages relayed from Precious Auntie to her daughter. The theme of heart resonates so deeply through The Bonesetters Daughter, that a whole chapter is titled after it. Not only that, but a reader can also sense the importance of a hearts symbolism because it is stated over and over in the first paragraph of this said chapter. If that’s not enough, it is also the name of Precious Auntie’s village: Immortal Heart. By employing skills learned through analyzing “How to Read Literature like a Professor” a reader takes note of the metonymy and irony of the village’s name. Reader may infer that, possibly, a heart is the importance of the story. A heart may be the message of the novel. It symbolizes a particular beginning and end. A heart from a sad woman, possibly Precious Aunties heart, ties everything together. She is the start of the family, and she is the end. She is the resolution, the big mystery behind Amy Tan’s novel. But then why is the village name Immortal heart, and how can an immortal heart end? Ironic, but maybe, this symbolizes the heart of the novel, the village, Precious Auntie, the resolute perseverance of survival of both, only to come to an indefinite demise, left to

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