The Victims Essay -- Analysis, Sharon Olds

The process of addressing memories of private vile within The Victims by Sharon Olds is implied through contradictive perspectives. In the poesy t present is a shift in focus and note during line 17. The poem addresses issues of scummy from two distinct perspectives, the starting coming from a little misfire and the second a grown woman. The narrative, imagery and diction are diverse in the two contrasting parts of the poem, and the second half guardedly qualifies the first, as if to illustrate the more mature and established attitudes of the narrator in her older years a stipulation of the easy imitation of the early years, when the mothers views dominated and set the tone. Change has governed the poems structure here differences in age and attitude are supported by an in all different point of view and frame of reference. The change in the tone of the stylistic elements used by Sharon Olds implicitly portrays the impact that suffering has on the family sphere the complex emotions that arise because of divorce are conveyed through departed and present perspectives, comparative imagery and a significant shift in tone.The change in perspective of the narrative, from past to present, portrays the father in two different lights. The poem is told from the point of view of the daughter of a brace who experience marriage problems. The beginning of The Victims illustrates the memories that the woman is recalling nostalgically of her childhood. From lines 1 to 17 the narrator evokes her father, with the repetition of you, (1, 3) who had acted terribly during the narrators y bulge outh and who was utterly kicked out and divorced by the mother. The narrator describes her father who, to his daughter, lived a sybaritic and insensitive... ...Olds to portray to the reader, through diction, the image of a drowning person. This image, after being taken, canvas and dissected, reveals deeper connections with the narrator, the narrators father and society as a wh ole. In conclusion, The Victims concerns real purposes and themes that enhance the overall text. When perceiving the term victim many deal immediately think of a target of violence or abuse. In the poem The Victims, Olds portrays the sufferers as victims of an experience, rather than a physical scar. As a child, Sharon Olds parents divorced. So who is the victim in The Victims? As the narrative, imagery and diction evolve, from the first half to the second half of the poem, so does the classification of victim. Throughout the poem the mother, children and father are all victimized, but also made out to be the culprits.