Dec 17, 2009

The Flowers | Characters

The protagonist of the story, Myop, is a skillfully if sparely drawn portrait of an enthusiastic ten-year-old girl. Readers gain little biographical information about Myop, other than the fact that she is the daughter of sharecroppers. The central fact of her character is the pleasure that she takes in the moment, in the seemingly endless summer days of childhood. This living-in-the-present, juxtaposed with the final suggestion that Myop's childhood comes to an end, makes the revelation of the violent past of lynching that much more shocking.

Despite his namelessness, it could be...