The Last Lullaby

472 Words2 Pages
All that lives must die and, as this story suggests, that includes traditions. In The Last Lullaby by Marie Moser, the theme of the story is loss -- the perishability, the attenuation of our ties to our culture, our history, and our family. This is manifested in the pink plate symbolizing tradition, the French language and the poem symbolizing culture, and the photo album representing the family heritage taking a back seat in the life of the generation today. In this story Lisette’s French-Canadian culture has little meaning for her, “’it’s not that important to me any more,’ she says” (259), or for other members of her family, “of the one hundred and seventy-three people descended from our parents, there are only four families who have kept our traditions and our language” (259). Lisette has no interest in relating her family’s history to Paul, “Lisette hasn’t told me much about her past.” That onus is on Lisette’s great-aunt, 92 years of age, a historian who will soon pass away. The theme of this succinct story is embodied in Lisette’s great-grandmother’s (now great aunt’s) pink rectangular plate. The importance of the plate is underscored upon its introduction in the story; its description is given a full paragraph of its own, and the plate is described in loving, almost poetic, detail – “a pattern like tattered lace” (258), “the sun shining on it gives it an iridescent glow” (258). It’s the plate, as a symbol, that at the end awakens in Lisette her own sense of connection to her tradition and her awareness of its fragility: the beautiful plate connects her to her past of at least three generations, but the plate has a “tiny” crack through it – her connection, like the plate, is extremely fragile and will not last. Lastly, the other elements in the story, as they should, relate to and give concreteness to the main theme. For example, the photo album
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