Grandmother's Sunday Dinner Patricia Hampl

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In the short story, Grandmother’s Sunday Dinner by Patricia Hampl, the various literary elements work together in order to tell the flashback of a woman’s dinner with her family. The central symbol, the grandmother's passion for food, represents a family tradition and the stubborn grandmother herself represents a force with whom to be dealt. The central symbol allows for the author to generalize the theme. Because the grandmother symbolized a reckoning force, the author would have to be polite towards her grandmother who “was a woman possessed by an idea” (Hampl 55), depicting the theme of treating everyone with respect. Moreover, adding to the entertainment, irony forces the reader to stop and enjoy the humor that characterizes the irony.

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