After You My Dear Alphonce

Authors Note: This is an text analysis/ response to a short story we read in class.

In the story, "After you my dear alphonce", by Shirley Jackson, Has a basic plot line of the 1940's. The point is to show racism  and i think that's what the author is trying to get through to us. Most of the text in this story is showing a mother having racism towards a little African American boy, named Boyd. Its not the typical racism many people would think, it’s a being overly nice racism. 

For example; the quote, "As she turned to show Boyd where to sit, she saw he was a Negro boy, smaller than Johnny but about the same age", shows that she saw that he was a little African boy and thought to herself, oh I'm going to be very nice to this little boy, because he is not as wealthy as us and offer him some things just because he is African American.

In this short story, the mother thought that Boyd's family was less wealthy than hers, so she was being nice and trying to help but little did she know that Boyd's family was just like hers. The text analysis that the author put in it actually helped me understand the story better, because when she thought she was right, she was wrong.  For Example; when the mother said, " I'm not mad I'm just disappointed", shows that her inferences were wrong on him.

There were so many ways that text analysis did help make the story better, with it going from happy and caring, to disappointed and wrong. The author showed how to text cote the important parts of this story, and it helps people understand better.