Essay: Rita Lafferty’s Lucky Summer

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Essay: Rita Lafferty’s Lucky Summer ”The summer I was sixteen I had my first real job[...]” the text, ”Rita Laffery’s Luckys Summer” written by Elaine Ford, starts in medias rés, 1. Persona narrator, and drag us into ”Jojo’s Bakery”, where the 16-year-old girl who tells the story works. The genre is dirty realism, and the whole story is written in a very minimalistic language – we only get to know the most important stuff – the rest is up to us to find out. We never get to know the name of the girl who tells the story, but we know that she lives in Broadway and gets a summer job at the bakery. The whole story is now a flashback about the time she worked there, and about a girl named Rita Lafferty. At first we hear about Rita’s looks; her reddish brown hair and her bucked teeth. The color of red, may tell us, in symbols, that she’s a girl who is going to make a sacrifice, and the brown color may tell us that she’s subdued and persevering. The bucked teeth could be a symbol too; the smile she gets of her lucky summer may not be that beautyful and happy after all. We get told that she lives in Fosket Street, Broadway with her mother, Mrs. Lafferty, who’s a bit of a witch. Then we hear about her boyfriend, Frank Hodges, who she met in a supermarket when he dropped a can of cream-style corn on her toe. And in action of this, and to tell her his apology, he sends her a large ceramic donkey with a clump of geraniums in each raffia saddle basket (p. 46, l. 14-15), and the donkey may symbolices that he’s a ”jackass” and wants to apologize. Geraniums, at the other hand, is a symbol of beauty and hope; it could be a compliment and a hope for a relationship, but we get to know that geraniums are Rita’s favorite flowers, and that’s what makes me think that they are a symbol for her state of mind; the hope that he’s a good guy. Afterwards she really falls in love
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