Odd One Out

Odd One Out Everyone knows of that one particular person, whether family member, friend or foe, that is all about themselves. Lost deep in the depths of their egocentric minds, these individuals seem to only care about keeping everything in orbit, around them. In “Everyday Use” by Alice Walker, the daughter named ‘Dee’ definitely seemed to take on this personality. Dee displayed traits of an arrogant and jealous self-centered individual who only cared for own well-being. Dee’s arrogance is frequently thrown at the reader in many parts of the story. For one, Dee believes she has some self-righteous entitlement of many of her family’s items of heritage; the top of the butter churn carved by ‘Uncle Bobby’ and the quilts. And secondly, Dee’s justification for her deserving of the family heritage was weakly structured. For Dee to own the heritage of her family simply because she feels that the items need to be preserved in her possession, should not give her the right to own all of the belongings. Its fine to ask for one slice, but do not ask for the whole cake. Following the subject of Dee’s arrogance, the root of Dee’s arrogance must be that of jealousy. Dee is jealous of all the things that her family has and simply wants a piece of it, and what seems to be a piece of it all. When she takes the pictures of her and her family, she must had done this to preserve her family heritage as well, because she wanted to be better connected with her family roots. However, it seems only natural for Dee to be jealous of what her family has. She had been gone away for so long from her family and obviously wanted to recollect some of what her family had, but she wanted to keep it all as her own. The pictures she took were fine, and it was fine of her to ask for the butter churn top, but when she kept picking for more and more items from her family, the root of jealousy definitely proved to be much more prevalent in her nature. One last trait seen in Dee is hypocrisy. When