Figurative Language In Alice Walker's Alice

In the story, “Alice”, the narrator's role helps satisfy my curiosity about Alice by having a relation between her and the narrator. The relation they have is that the narrator is another character in the story. The narrator is involved in every part of the story because she is describing Alice in the ways she remembered her. The narrator in this story is a subordinate character who interacts with the protagonist because throughout the story, the narrator is talking about Alice using imagery and sometimes figurative language to describe her as a person and what she looks like. The narrator doesn’t physically interact with Alice that much, but instead she describes what goes through her mind when seeing Alice. This is satisfying the curiosity

In the beginning of the story, the narrator portrays Alice as a beautiful woman that is perfect in many ways. Paragraph two describes Alice through the narrator's point of view using imagery and figurative language all in a positive connotation. At the beginning of paragraph two it states, “Alice, tall like a man, with soft wooly hair spread out in tangles like a feathered hat and her face oily and her legs ashy, whose beauty I never quite believed because she valued it so little but was real.” To the narrator, this woman is beautiful because she is too young to realize how filthy Alice really is. But to anyone else that would see alice in this way, they would think that alice is disgusting and dirty. The attitude the narrator has toward Alice changes about half way through the story. As the narrator grows up, she portrays Alice in a different way than she had as a kid. She now describes Alice in a negative connotation. In the middle of the story it states, “I could not see her beauty, only the limp flowered dress and the tangled hair and the face puffy from too much drinking and no sleep, I cut off her smile.” At this point in the story, the narrator comes to the realization that Alice is not beautiful at all, but rather