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Character Analysis Of Saranell In Pat Carr's Death Of A Confederate Soldier

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Life can throw obstacles in our way and make life difficult but the key to surviving is picking oneself back up again. In the novella, The Death of a Confederate Soldier, by Pat Carr, the author writes about the Birdsong Family living in the Civil War Era. The father, Ian, is fighting in the war while his wife is at home with their only child, Saranell. Throughout this novella, Saranell transforms from a naive, booksmart girl to a mature woman despite her age because of the misery and abandonment she went through. As an eight year old girl, Saranell is naive and oblivious to the world around her as well as being neglected by her mother, Geneva. “If that's the way they treat their slaves in the North,” she breathed, “no wonder …show more content…

“Then the mask said, ‘I wasn't fair to your father. I shouldn't have married him.’ The voice was more like a scraping against hard wood with a file and the wound of a mouth didn't seem to move. ‘Such a ridiculous waste of years.’ The swollen tongue may have tried to swallow, ‘ For us all’” (Carr 142). As Saranell was about to lose Geneva, someone who had discarded her out of their life and responsibility, she was struck with the brutal truth. That her mother had never loved her father and that she, Saranell, was a mistake. This made it harder for Saranell to let go of Geneva because now not only is she haunted by her mother’s lie but now she has to deal with the pain of the false love from her mother and the failed security of a family. “She rocked the ring back and forth in the sun….‘Mama always said there wasn't anything at the center of a pearl but a sharp grain of sand the oyster had to learn to handle.’ He watched her for a moment before he said gently, ‘I guess maybe growing up a little like that oyster making them pearls. Maybe it's just learning how to handle them sharp bits as you go along.’ She pocketed the ring, staring across the land that was Texas, and resettled Madison in her lap. ‘Maybe,’ she said” (Carr 161). Along the journey to maturity that Saranell was on, she was receiving life lessons from Renny because of her mother's emotional absence from her life.

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