Alice Paulette White Theme

In the short story “Alice,” Paulette White uses the narrator’s childhood memories to communicate the theme to the readers. While this adds interest to the story, it proves to be unreliable. Throughout the story there are multiple times where, as a child, the narrator proves to be inexperienced in life. In lines 5-12, we see Alice’s home through the young eyes of the narrator when her mother would go to “borrow things” from Alice. The home is disgusting; “where the flies buzzed in and out of the always open door,” and the narrator “fought frowns,” when walking on the sticky wooden floors, and the scent of the rank-smelling rooms. Alice would sit on a dirty lawn chair drinking warm beer, doing nothing to fix the shack she called home. The narrator noticed how unkempt Alice let the house become, but she never made it obvious that she saw.

Eight years have passed. The narrator is 26 years old, and is now a mother; just like Alice. In the eight years Alice had lost her husband and two of her children. She is old and has tumor filled knees. Alice says in lines 98-105, “And in those eight years I had married and become the mother of sons and did not always keep my floors clean or my hair combed or my legs oiled and I learned to like the taste of beer and how to talk the bad-woman talk… Alice, when I saw her again, was in black, after the funeral of my brother.” It wasn’t until the narrator had gone through exactly what Alice had gone through did she realize why Alice had lived the way she did. In lines 113-117, she says, “When I found Alice sitting alone… I was afraid to speak because there was too much I wanted to say.” The moral of the story is don’t judge a book by it’s cover. Paulette White’s decision to make the narrator a child for most of the story was genius. As a child, you don’t care to look at someone’s personality, only their physical appearance. Then as you grow old you realize that looks can be