"The Hell with Dying", by Alice Walker is a short story about how the narrator is coping with experiencing her first love and first death. The narrator talks about how her neighbor Mr. Sweet, who always threatens to die until the narrator and her siblings come and revive Mr. Sweet. The story indicates that laughter and love can be the best medicine and can help someone who is experiencing depression. The story portrays the conflict of growing up and experiencing love, death and unhappiness. Mr. Sweet shows the side of depression and failure that Alice Walker might have faced had she not pushed her way to success. The protagonist is a girl in her early to mid-twenties. The antagonist is her elderly neighbor, Mr. Sweet Little.
The author Alice Walker is a writer, poet and activist who has written several books and short stories. She has also won the Pulitzer prize. “Her work has been translated into more than two dozen languages, and her books have sold more
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At the end, she struggles not to believe that she has failed to revive him like she did all the time when she was younger. She believes that he still lives inside her because he is the first love of her life. This showed that everyone has a time when they must die and nothing, not even love, will change a person’s destiny. Throughout her life the young girl was always, in a sense, on call to be ready at a moment’s notice to rush over to Mr. Sweet’s home to bring him around and save his life. The narrator is seeing death first hand and believing in it for the first time in her life. In the end of the story the conflict is resolved by the narrator accepting that death is a part of life and cannot be evaded. Walker implies that death is something that we all will have to go through in our lives, but the power of love can help prolong someone who is depressed and is giving up