Essay On A Small Place By Jamaica Kincaid

In a country as large as the United States, it is common to come across many people who have travelled to various places all over the world, romanticizing the idea of wandering and experiencing the world without, however, taking a moment to think about the people in the places they may visit. It can be easy for those who live in big, important countries to be blind to issues happening in the smaller countries they visit, and how that can impact the people who live there. In A Small Place, Jamaica Kincaid uses a bitter, accusatory tone, directly addressing the reader as she puts them in the position of a tourist visiting Antigua. Her tone is effective in drawing attention to the naivety of tourists who look to Antigua to escape their own lives …show more content…
By using a second person point of view, she tells her story through the reader as if they were a tourist visiting Antigua. However, she writes with a certain tone, as if she’s accusing the reader of something. Already on the first page Kincaid accuses the reader of being naïve when she says, “You are a tourist and you have not yet seen a school in Antigua, you have not yet seen the hospital in Antigua, you have not yet seen a public monument in Antigua.” (p. 1). It is subtle at first, but slowly throughout the novel she becomes less and less gentle. Only a little later, she insults the tourist saying, “An ugly thing, that is what you are when you become a tourist, an ugly, empty thing, a stupid thing, a piece of rubbish pausing here and there to gaze at this and taste that, and it will never occur to you that the people who inhabit the place in which you have just paused cannot stand you,” (p. 17). At times, she even breaks out a bitter kind of sarcasm (p. 5). Thus, her tone is largely bitter towards tourists and accusatory towards the reader, who she puts in the position of a tourist, to convey her frustration with their naivety about what is happening in her