Identity And The Human Desire To Blindness In Alice Walker's The Mechanics Of Being

This article brings forwards some interesting conversation on the issue of identity and the human desire to label things. In writing about his father blindness, or in write about his out experience as a black youth, he worries that other things about him will be erased. He worries that, when his works gets labelled in a certain way, the other factors that go into what he is writing abut will be ignored. The is the clear purpose of writing “The Mechanics of Being,” Walker wants to write about his father as a person, and not simply as a blind man, but as he attempts to do so he still has a tendency to write about blindness. At the end of the article, Walker tells a humorous story about his father accidentally taking underwear to the dry cleaners, and he writes, “If I ever attempt to write another novel about my father, this is where it will begin.” I found myself wishing that he had

In bringing up his father have Alzheimers, the author remains the reader that there are reasons that a person’s memory can fail them. Later, when he talks about his declining scores when he went to school, he admits that he cannot remember his earlier grade, but has to simply imagine them. By doing these things, the writer points out to the reader that they account that they are receiving is the product of a person’s memory and, for this reason, it can be flawed. Most nonfiction writes try to avoid saying things such as “I cannot recall” so directly to the reader, but rather choose to portray the truth as well as they can. The final thing that I wanted to respond to in regards to this essay is they way in which it is structured. The short, and often dated, paragraph make it seem as though the writer is laying out at timeline for the reader, and this is an interesting stylistic choice because it seems to give a glimpse into how the writer categorizes and organizes his own