Congratulations to Monae, who made a huge breakthrough this week. This essay is a testament to how much improvement can come through effort.

Overcoming All Obstacles

In “A White Heron,” Sarah Orne Jewett uses diction, imagery, and narrative pace to dramatize the adventure of the main character, Sylvia. The author dramatizes the adventure to emphasize the theme of reaching our goals.

The author first conveys her message by using diction to accentuate the difficulty of Sylvia’s journey. The tree, which symbolizes her challenge, is portrayed as “monstrous” (21). This choice of words not only implies difficulty but also danger. In addition , the tree is without “boundary” (4), which shows that Sylvia is going at her own risk. Therefore,  the author’s diction sets up a huge obstacle. Later in the passage, the diction changes when Sylvia triumphs over the challenge. Sylvia is “brave (51) and “determined” (45), no longer “small and silly” (17). This change in diction demonstrates the grit that Sylvia has developed.

Jewett uses imagery by describing  the scene of how Sylvia is feeling about meeting her goal. At first Jewett conveys  Sylvia as a brave girl but as she sees the “green leaves heavy and wet with dew” (24-25), she starts to get that fear and notice that this adventure is not as easy as she thought it would be. As she discovers this, she then  “crept out along the saying oak limb at last, and took the daring step across into the old pine-tree” (34-35). Once Sylvia does this, Jewett expresses triumph and a “daring” (35) characteristic that helps Sylvia get through her obstacle. As she perseveres, she soon reaches the top and notices how in  the “glorious east flew two hawks” (60). “How low they looked in the air from that height when before one had only seen far up” (61-62). When Sylvia finally sees this panoramic view, the author symbolizes this as the met expectation of finally reaching her goal. When “Sylvia felt as if she too could go flying away among clouds” (65-66) that was the moment when she felt as if she could accomplish all. The purpose that Jewett made in using imagery was that, sky’s the limit and its better to visualize it and live it.

Finally Jewett uses narrative pace so that the reader can get a smooth flow of how her adventure went. The author describes Sylvia’s adventure in a format that gives the readers a consistent pattern of what Sylvia went through in her adventure. The author uses phrases that describe the height of the tree as “monstrous” (21). Then the author then slowly works down to showing how she becomes afraid of the “dangerous pass” (31) and later builds the adventure to Sylvia being this “brave” (51) women with grit. The flow of how the story was presented has affect on how the journey went. Jewett put the narrative pace in this motion so it can let the reader digest the heroic experience Sylvia went through and how you can achieve your goals.

In conclusion, in this piece the author does dramatize Sylvia’s adventure by using diction, imagery and narrative pace. She does this by using “brave” (51) and “small silly”(17) vocabulary, descriptive image and a steady narrative  pace to exaggerate how her emotions on her adventure changes as she reaches the “golden dazzle” (59) of success.  Therefore Jewett sends the message of “determination” (45) through Sylvia by showing readers that she met her goal and that she is capable of getting to that higher place in life.