Adah In The Poisonwood Bible

In the novel, The Poisonwood Bible by Barbra Kingsolver, poetry is continuously used to illustrate Adah’s character. Adah Price is the one character that always appears as though she does not belong. During her childhood while her family lived in Africa, she did not speak, and also was born with hemiplegia, which caused her to walk with a terrible limp. She was created to be very analytical, intelligent, and extremely outside the box. Her habits from when she was younger, such as reading and thinking backwards, can directly relate to her disability and is seen as her way of handling how it feels to be so different from those around her. Not only does Adah have her own unique ways of thinking, but also she is very connected to poetry. She uses it often to connect her problems to other people, since she cannot always relate to those in her family. “Because I could not stop for death, He kindly stopped for me,” (Kingsolver 365). This

Yet according to her allusion with Dickinson’s poem, death is a right. Adah feels as though death is so inevitable, and that most likely has to do with her experiences regarding Ruth May and what she witnessed growing up as a white child in Africa. The next line in the poem is, “Why swagger then?” and that is basically stating that if death is a right, why fear it or try to avoid it? Adah later states that she could not swagger if she tried because she does not have the legs for it, which means that she truly knows that no one is exempt from death. Adah’s experiences, values, and interests all come together through this single Dickinson poem, and her character in the book is even still further developed. It is yet another instance where Adah’s love for poetry allows her to connect her emotions and explain to the reader truly how she feels, because verbal expression was never Adah’s strong