Diction

The Color Purple Blog Number Two: Diction• “I am I have always been a good girl” (1)• “’What you setting here laughing like a fool fer?’”(15) “Who ain’t? I ast.”(14) “He walk stiff and say his teef hurt.”(35)• “Let’s make quilt pieces out of these messed up curtains, she say… I sleeps like a baby now.”(40)The first quote is one of the first lines from the novel. It introduces the main character Celie. By crossing out “I am”, Walker demonstrates Celie’s uncertainties about life and about herself. Celie does not know what she is. This creates an uncertain or even uneasy tone in the beginning of the novel. The second group of quotes are from different places in the novel. The diction that Walker uses can demonstrate the people’s ignorance and poor education. The characters in the novel use slang and improper grammar. Walker shows the social conditions and the context of the novel when she writes these things into her novel. The third quote is perhaps the most thematic. The characters take something representing desolation and hardship, “messed up curtains”, and do something productive and pleasant with them, “make quilt pieces”. With the good that comes from the bad, Celie “sleeps like a baby”. The characters make a good thing from a bad thing, and use it to have better life. Walker is showing some hope in the characters. She makes a hopeful, if only slightly, tone.