Seth Martin, Roanoke, VA Bill Salyers College Composition II 2010-03-02 Setting, Style, Characters, and Theme In Cynthia Ozicks

The Shawl The Shawl is a very short story set during the Holocaust of World War II, in which author Cynthia Ozick expertly weaves setting, style, characters, and theme together to powerful effect. The story portrays a brief period during the lives of a Jewish woman, Rosa, her teenage niece, Stella, and Rosas young daughter, Magda. The central conflict in the story arises as a result of Stellas jealousy of Magda, culminating in climatic crisis when Stella takes Magdas shawl. Missing her shawl, Magda frantically searches and cries out for it, which exposes her existence to the camp guards and results in her violent death at the hands of a guard. Ozick relates the story in omniscient third-person point-of-view, hopping from character to character, effortlessly relating linked thoughts without formal sentence structure similar to a stream of consciousness. Ozick uses universal human attitudes about injustice and futility to create to powerful tones of anger and a smoldering fury through the Jewish experience of the Holocaust. Ozick uses setting to tell much of the story of The Shawl and to set her tone. The story opens with Rosa, Stella, and Magda on a death march to a concentration camp. Later the story skips ahead to life in the concentration camp when Magda is fifteen months old. To powerful effect of tone, Ozick weaves vivid descriptions of the setting into the plot in a seemingly casual manner: Still, Magda laughed at her shawl when the wind blew its corners, the bad wind with pieces of black in it, that made Stellas and Rosas eyes tear (292); and in the barracks they

Martin 2 spoke of flowers, and rain: excrement, thick turd-braids, and the slow stinking maroon waterfall that slunk down from the upper bunks, the stink mixed with a bitter fatty floating smoke that greased Rosas skin (293). Ozicks use of literary style serves to draw the reader more deeply into the story and connect the reader with her tone intuitively. Ozick opens The Shawl with Stella, cold, cold, the coldness of hell (290), which dramatically contrasts concepts of hell, typically associated with heat, and the cold associated with the barrenness of a terrible winter. This opening line sets the tone for the narrative and is characteristic of Ozicks style throughout. Unusual word choices and unusual sentence structure without connective words to round out the prose create an effect similar to free-word associative thought combinations, and permit Ozick to efficiently and effectively impart attitude and tone toward her theme throughout the entirety of the story. Delivering greater emotional impact during the climax of the story, Ozicks unusual prose takes on a poetic cadence: She only stood, because if she ran they would shoot, and if she tried to pick up the sticks of Magdas body they would shoot, and if she let the wolfs screech ascending now through the ladder of her skeleton break out, they would shoot (294). In addition to the three obvious main characters in the The Shawl, Ozick also employs an inanimate character, the electric fence that speaks to Rosa. The fence with grainy sad voices (293) represents the Jewish people whose lamenting voices strummed so convincingly, so passionately, it was impossible to suspect them of being phantoms (293). Ozick ties the immediate experience of the three main characters in The Shawl to the broader Jewish experience of others through the electric fence. Ozick uses the fence to reveal her theme.

Martin 3 Ozick's theme in The Shawl is the experience of the Jewish people during the Holocaust of World War II, and their strength, their ability to endure under this absolute oppression. During the climax of the story while Rosa helplessly watches her child taken away to a shocking violent death, the presumably older wiser voices in the fence direct her to hold up the shawl, high; the voices told her to shake it, to whip with it, to unfurl it like a flag (293), which is an outward semblance of strength and dignity, and which commands Rosa obeys. Upon Magdas death, the voices went mad in their growling, urging Rosa to run and run to the spot where Magda had fallen from her flight against the electrified fence (294), which is an effort to retain and regain pride and dignity in the face of absolute abjection by the humanistic caring shown in collecting the childs remains, regardless of sure death that would ensue for Rosa if she did, which command Rosa finds herself incapable of obeying. Cynthia Ozicks The Shawl is a short masterpiece of literary fiction. Ozick beautifully combines style, setting, characters, and theme to powerful effect. The setting is the crucial starting point, filled out by efficient character development that contribute her attitude and theme, enhanced expertly by the informal style and third person omniscient point of view, which affect powerful and memorable emotional impact at the storys climax.

Martin 4 Works Cited Ozick, Cynthia. The Shawl. Literature: A Portable Anthology. Ed. Janet E. Gardner, Beverly Lawn, Jack Ridl, and Peter Schakel. 2nd ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2009. 290-294. Print.