Conversational; Eloquent
Chatting Up a Storm
Doesn't it feel like we're just chilling with the narrator in her yard and listening to her stories? That's probably because the writing in "Everyday Use" looks a lot like speech. Our narrator generally uses short sentences, some of which aren't even technically complete (gasp). Look at how she describes what she'll do after Maggie leaves the house:
I'll be free to sit here and I guess just sing church songs to myself. Although I never was a good singer. Never could carry a tune. (13)
These kinds of sentences are much more the kind of thing you'd hear on the other end of the phone than what you'd read in a newspaper article.
Another part of what makes the writing conversational is that, once in awhile, the narrator addresses us readers directly. She remarks, for instance that:
You've no doubt seen those TV shows where the child who has "made it" is confronted, as a surprise, by her own mother and father, tottering in weakly from backstage. (3)
Walker's conversational writing style is a really clever way of pulling us in to the story. After all, it's pretty hard to turn away from a story in which someone's talking directly to us—that would be rude, right?
Don't get us wrong, though: What the narrator actually talks about isn't exactly the kind of small talk you'd make with some stranger on the bus. The narrator raises some pretty serious, even dark, subjects. But even these are presented in highly conversational language and through informal sentence structures, like when the narrator wonders, "How long ago was it that the other house burned? Ten, twelve years?" (10). One effect of this conversational style is that we readers may be more inclined to actually listen to what the narrator is saying even when she's saying things that may be a bit difficult to hear.
Shall I Compare Thee To Bubbles in Lye?
Conversational and eloquent may seem like contradictions. Our trusty old dictionary defines eloquent as vividly or movingly expressive, so how eloquent can we really be when we're hanging out and talking with our friends at the mall? But Walker manages to pull off eloquence in her writing even while using a chatty style. If we look closely, in fact, we can notice lots and lots of vivid, expressive, and highly-crafted sentences to which Walker probably gave a ton of thought (and maybe even blood, sweat, and tears).
One of the dead giveaways of these sentences is the use of metaphor. Here's just one example of many, as the narrator compares Dee's sense of humor to a chemical process:
Impressed with [Dee] they worshiped the well-turned phrase, the cute shape, the scalding humor that erupted like bubbles in lye. (15)
You can't tell us that this sentence didn't likely take thought or effort (well, you could, but we'd be really jealous of your writing skills).
Walker's eloquence reminds us that her conversational writing style is still deliberate… And that means it probably took some thought and hard work.