The Place Where The Sidewalk Ends By Shel Silverstein

Have you ever wondered what it means to be a part of life? In the fiction book Jeremy FInk and The Meaning Of Life, a boy named Jeremy and his friend Lizzy go through a journey to find keys to open Jeremy’s dead dad’s box, which ends up containing a letter. In the fiction poem The Place Where The Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein, the “sidewalk” is the journey of life, and people have to go through bad parts of the sidewalk to get to good parts of the sidewalk. Therefore, Mass and Silverstein use literary devices to suggest that life is about the journey, and the challenges people overcome. Jeremy Fink And The Meaning Of Life expresses the theme of life being about the journey and challenges people overcome. Mass illustrates this in the letter

Silverstein states how “there is a place where the sidewalk ends/and before the street begins/and there the grass grows soft and white/and there the sun burns crimson bright”(Silverstein 1-4), and also states how “Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black/and the dark street winds and bends past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow/we shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,”(Silverstein 7-10). The first quote represents a “perfect area” right between the place where the sidewalk (which is a metaphor for life) and the street by stating how “the grass grows soft and white”(Silverstein 3), describing luscious grass, and by stating how “the sun burns crimson bright”, sunlight being a metaphor for good. The 2nd quote, in the 2nd stanza, represents a bad area, as it says how “the smoke blows black”, and there are flowers in the color of asphalt (rotting flowers). This part of the “sidewalk journey” is tough, because it says how “the dark street winds and bends”, and a winding and bending path is hard to travel on. This tough part of life is where the people are right now, and the poem says “let us leave this place,”(Silverstein 7) when starting to describe the bad place, and says “we shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,”(Silverstein 10), to show that the people described in the poem are steadily walking towards the good