Maxine Clair Cherry Bomb

Memories are an individual’s stored experiences from certain moments in his or her past. Memories carry feelings based on the experience such as nostalgia when thinking about a past lover or anger when thinking about a moment of betrayal, but these remembered feelings and saved perceptions of the situation do not always match the physical impact of the event. Children are especially susceptible to this as innocence softens the severity of situations. In the excerpt from her story “Cherry Bomb,” Maxine Clair explores a myriad of literary techniques in order to characterize the narrator’s childhood memories as positive even though in reality are depressive. The speaker’s memories are characterized majorly through her perception of each event as a child as well as her perception of the event as an adult. Throughout the excerpt, …show more content…
Furthermore, the narrator introduces the “Hairy Man” as a seemingly harmless neighborhood tale of an odd neighbor, similar to that of how the children in To Kill A Mockingbird view Boo Radley. In actuality, however, it can be inferred by the speaker’s memories of the man “in his fenced-in yard, wooly-headed and bearded, hollering...until a nurse kind of woman...came out and took him back inside” that the man has some sort of real problems, which as a child, the narrator did not truly realize. Her mother’s comment on the man’s light blue windows being “a peaceful color for somebody shell shocked,” adds to the disconnect between child perception and adult perception because it is a physical representation of the ironic and hidden dismal nature of the world. Another demonstration is the cherry bomb incident in that the speaker uses imagery like “a keloid like a piece of twine down the side of his face” and “his glass eye that stared in a fixed angle at the sky”