Analysis Of Anna Quindlen's The Lighting Bugs Are Back

It's like lightning without the thunder. It's the “magic” that these microscopic creatures portray that make them so fascinating. How could they possibly so intriguing? At first glance, “The Lighting Bugs Are Back” by Anna Quindlen appears to be about how people compress the complexities of their lives into simplistic and nostalgic terms. But closer inspection reveals that the author is encouraging the reader to allow simple fragmented memories to trigger a wave of nostalgia. The speaker, Anna Quindlen, has an audience that could be seen as people who try too hard to reduce the complexities in their lives to simplistic terms. At the outset the essay, Anna Quindlen employs rhetorical questions, diction, imagery, and syntax in order to elicit the compression of the complexities in our lives into

“The lightning bugs trapped in empty peanut butter jars with triangular holes on top, made with the point of a beer can opener. The fading smears of phosphorescent yellow-green where the older, more jaded kids have used their sneaker soles to smear the lights across the gray pavement. “Let them out,” our mothers would say, “or they will die in there.” Finally, perfect sleep. Sweaty sheets, no dreams.” This excerpt gives impeccable evidence as to why people who try too hard to reduce the complexities in their lives to simplistic terms by telling us a nostalgic memory from when Quindlen was very young and what people used to do and say back then regarding lightning bugs. On the end of the excerpt, Quindlen uses syntax through sentence fragments to imbed her final thoughts on the lightning