Short Story 1

The short story that I’ve read is Thank You M’am by Lankston Hughes. This short story is about a young man who snatches an old ladies purse but she ends up helping him. The way she helped the young man is how she showed him that snatching purses wasn’t the right thing to be doing even if he didn’t have the money to get the things that he wanted. The main reason why he never got far when he snatched her purse was because the purse weighed as just as much as he did, and soon as he grabbed it he feel and couldn’t go anywhere. Once all of this has happened she snatched him by the arm and took him all the way home with her because she said that he had needed his face washed. This old lady even feeds the boy maybe because she knows that he has a problem and he’s only a child, which is something that I would have never done.
The young man in the story never says anything about his parents the way his part is played in the story. Personally I think that he doesn’t have anyone that he could really rely on that’s probably the reason he is going around taking peoples purses. The lady purse that he tried to take was very generous to a person that tried to steal from her even though the boy said, “I didn’t aim to.” Meaning that he didn’t intend to which the lady knew that that was a lie.
The things that I think about the characters in the story, is that the old lady seems like a very nice person. The reason that I say that about the lady is because how she treats someone after they make a big mistake like the one the boy did in the story. To take someone who tries to steal from you home with you it really takes a caring and loving person to try to help the person that is in need of some home training. The things I think about the young man who caused all of the altercations, are that he is very rude and self centered especially someone who would steal from an old elderly lady. If I had of been in her shoes he would have been in a whole lot of trouble with me then I would have took him to the police, which is where he thought he was going before asking her “you gonna take me to jail?”
The author of the story really didn’t tell what the characters of the story were like. To really get to know these characters you had to read and find out through the way they talked and their actions in the story. Some quotes that really describes Mrs. Luella Bates Washington Jones is when she told the boy “Well, you didn’t have to snatch my pocketbook to get some suede shoes,” the she came to say “you could of asked me.”

Definitions

1. Simile- a figure of speech in which two unlike things are explicitly compared, as in “she is like a rose."he looked as if he was fourteen or fifteen."
2. Metaphor- something used, or regarded as being used, to represent something else
3. Personification- an imaginary person or creature conceived or figured to represent a thing or abstraction.
4. Allusion- the act of alluding.
5. Hyperbole- obvious and intentional exaggeration. ex."She was a large woman with a large purse that had everything in it but hammer and nails."
6. Irony- the use of words to convey a meaning that is the opposite of its literal meaning