Foreshadowing And Motifs In The Bonesetter's Daughter

Amy Tan has impacted many of her readers with her various books by showcasing her aptitude in several literary elements, such as; personification, foreshadowing, and motifs, and thus creating the world that takes place in The Bonesetter’s Daughter.

Motifs within The Bonesetter’s Daughter

In the beginning of the book, fingers was a dominant symbol shown, for Ruth she sees using fingers as organization since LuLing taught her to use them. "Ruth could still picture her mother counting in the Chinese style, pointing first to her baby finger and bending each finger down towards her palm, a motion that Ruth took to mean that all other possibilities and escape routes were closed." ( Tan 20). The use of this motif played a small role throughout the

Ruth is continued to be represented by an orchid till the end. As the story progresses Mr. Patel introduces a new type of orchid which will eventually describe Ruth later on. Another motif shown in the book, LuLing was explaining to Ruth about how there’s ghosts on the cliff behind the house, statings there has been suicides and numerous accounts of deaths. Making the cliff a symbol of death and almost a foreshadow for Ruth’s mother’s death when she wishes for her corpse to be thrown off the cliff. This motif hints at Ruth’s family background, and how they’re forever “plagued” to suffer death, whether it is suicide or not. This is also backed up by the fact that Precious Auntie had also committed suicide due to her daughter, LuLing, betrayed her. Reading about this scene was pretty shocking, stunning, or just plain depressing, which had an effect on how I view LuLing. By looking at this recurring situation of death and the mention of it, and you can insinuate that one of the themes is about death, which gives the book a solemn and grim tone as each page is flipped. This time, instead of Amy Tan’s theme of her previous works, fate

Those two cultures that are in The Bonesetter’s Daughter is Chinese and American, which Tan had used the The Joy Luck Club and The Valley of Amazement, and as usual the way Tan had implemented it into The Bonesetter’s Daughter was astonishing well. For instance, LuLing had lived in China for most of her life, and after coming to United States she had found it excruciatingly difficult to understand or incorporate this new culture into her daily life. Although LuLing ended up making it past that barrier and learned English just by listening to people speak, which I found to be impressive, but Ruth despised to learn it. And Ruth’s hatred for it had set her back on learning the English language, leading to her mispronouncing words, and confusing the definitions of words for something else. This whole situation of not wanting to improve is easily relatable to me since it can be frustrating to learn a language. As it is difficult to learn, and it’s easy to be envious of other people who have seemingly mastered the language in what seems to be