Gordon Parks Poverty

Words: 448
Pages: 2

Gordon Parks did not hesitate to present his disdain for poverty, and the obvious ignorance of outsiders to poverty by using the lives of those who survive under its circumstances.
In the beginning, Park depicts the mind of his frantic narrator, who is indignant on the matter of poverty but still naive to the true nature of it. He uses figurative language to introduced our narrator and his partner as well as illustrate their circumstance as an inconvenience. The essay starts with the two fighting the drastic temperature in Rio while taking refuge in shade. However, we then see, not simply read a set of words but can vividly see, the empty shell of a twelve year old boy. His physical state is clearly tiptoeing between life and death. Parks, immediately after having us sympathize for the privileged characters, shifts all of our focus to this boy. The boy who is his literary embodiment of poverty.
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His tone of the essay remaining unwaveringly sad as he details the living situations of the child and the circumstances of his family. He describes the box chair, the conservation of water and then ultimately revealing the health state of the young boy. The metaphors and sensory images he uses are accurately captured to the point where you can see the dirty wash basin used for rice. You feel the comfort a high class hotel just to return to the wreckage of a home a paragraph later. You feel the suffocation of the medical office and the heart dropping moment when the doctor states there is no hope. You are physically and actively there holding a child’s hand while reassuring him of a loss life. Parks’ phrases his writing in way where it helps inform the reader of his stance on what it really means to be poor by having them experience