The First Day Analysis

Things don’t always work out for a family of three young girls and their mother living in suburban Washington, D.C. Their father has walked out on them and their mother can’t read or write, but she challenges the status quo when she sends her eldest daughter to school to receive the education that she never got. In his short story, “The First Day,” Edward P. Jones uses literary techniques such as vivid imagery, symbols, and the theme that uneducated people value education more than educated people to show that the girls and their mother are trying their best. Vivid imagery is prevalent throughout the story in many instances, all as a result of the narrator, who is the eldest girl in the story, having flashbacks to experiences that she had
In the first paragraph, the speaker tells about how her mother was “plaiting and replaiting,” which makes it seem as if she is only fixing the speaker’s hair, but also stands for something much deeper. This is a symbol of the trials and tribulations that the speaker’s mother has been through that have not held her back. For her daughter, she tries and tries again until everything is as perfect as she can make it, despite having a broken family and lacking the education for a job. The speaker’s next bold metaphor, also in the first paragraph, relates her shoes to her revelation about her mother. She says that her “shoes are [her] greatest joy, black patent-leather miracles, and when one is nicked at the toe later that morning in class, [her] heart will break.” She means that her relationship with her mother is like her new shoes because they get along perfectly and she is totally dependent on her. When she finds out that she is going to school to learn to read and write, she also learns that her mother, who she looks up to most, cannot even read and write. This breaks her trust in her mother because the girl wants to be like her mother, but her mother never went to school. She is somewhat disappointed that her mother never told her that she was