Connected Stories

“The Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan, “Me Talk Pretty One Day” by David Sedaris and “Shame” by Dick Gregory, are narrative stories that give an account the main character’s life. These accounts include events that characterize a person’s development at one point in their life. These stories have a similarity and connected as they all have an overarching tone that leads the readers on what to expect as the narrative unfolds. Inspiration among the characters in the three stories is a factor that can be seen as a unifying factor that connects them together as the main character in each story is seen to achieve or overcome the numerous challenges they face (Spack p 46).

The urge to overcome something for instance, in Me Talk Pretty One Day and the urge to learn a language in the Mother Tongue and the devising of ways to deal with and overcome shameful experience have a common feature. This is say that the connection is evident when one is inspired to overcome something negative that might be hindering them. Similarly, in the Mother Tongue, an inspiration to learn something is as the author tries to learn French which is his mother tongue. The humorous way that each story unfolds separately, the presentation of facts makes the three stories similar, connected, and interesting as they catch the reader’s attention.

The three stories are connected in the sense that they build one another and they show that human is to error and that no human being is perfect. The stories use a lot of humor in putting across their point and supporting the major theme of the story. For instance, in Me Talk Pretty One Day, an humor is employed when the author wrote that the main character would make Woody Allen look ham-tongued (Sedaris p 17). The stories engage the reader’s thoughts and minds as one has to critically think about what they read so that they interpret and decipher the right meaning that was meant by the author.

However, the stories go ahead to unfold, and the reader is surprised as some of the inferred meaning as well as perceptions by them might be incorrect whereby this is attributed to passing at an early stage before interacting with other people. The difficulties encountered by the characters in the stories are aimed at developing the stories further and strengthening the resilience of the other characters. This makes the characters have a deeper sense of responsibility in conveying the intended message of each story. For instance, in the Mother Tongue the central figure teaches themselves how to talk their mother tongue while in Me Talk Pretty One day the author indicates that does not know how to talk well.

In Shame one is regretting talking too much and saying things that went overboard and negatively affected the good relationships with some sections of the people that they might have offended and that they interact with. This illustrates the connection in the stories from learning to talk one’s mother to talking pretty well and from dealing with shame that might be associated with talking too much (Warner, p.46). It is important to note that the stories are both in abroad and home setting and they appeal to both the settings as the meanings that areinferred in the three stories are universal.

Work cited:

Spack, Ruth. Guidelines: A Cros-Cultural Reading, Writing Text. Cambridge [etc.: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Print.

Sedaris, David. Me Talk Pretty One Day. London: Abacus, 2013. Print. Warner, J S. T. E. R. L. I. N. G. Thresholds: Literature Based Composition. Harcourt, 1997. Print.

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