The Color Of Water y1s54

Narendran Sairam AP English Language and Composition You are The Color of Water James McBride, in writing The Color Of Water, does so with a clear purpose in mind. In his book, through various rhetorical strategies, he makes it clear that his ethnicity does not matter. It does not matter if he is considered Jewish or Christian. It does not matter if he is considered black or white. He is simply “happy to be living.” He slowly comes to this realization as his story progresses and the narrative of his mother acts to bolster the realization he comes to at the end. The overarching rhetorical strategy McBride employs is the way the story begins in the way the story starts in tatters and puts itself together through the struggles of the main characters and this shift is defined by the diction and the syntax. In the beginning, McBride's mother struggles with her religion. Born and raised in a dysfunctional family with a violent father and a ively caring mother, both of whom are strong believers in the Jewish faith, Ruchel Dwajra Zylska becomes Rachel Deborah Shilsky and begins to hate her life and her religion. She tells the reader about her dislike of Sabbath because sitting down, for her “was the hardest thing to do.” She also expresses her problems with her family . Her mother's handicap made her “real conscious” and she constantly mentions her father's obsession with money. The repetition of the value that money holds in her father's mind makes it seem like she hates that habit. On top of that her father molesting her and ill treating her mother adds fuel to the fire that burns his reputation. Her bother Sam and his disappearance makes her family's condition look even worse; her life outside of home was just as bad. For example, she talks of the teasing she went through in school from the white folks. She explains how “It was a problem from the moment I started.” All of these things show her life to be in shambles. As the story progresses, her life begins to come in focus and the tables slowly begin to turn albeit slowly. Her first happy moment comes with the introduction of s. She disobeys her parents and sneaks away from home to enjoy s' company. She begins to move away from her Jewish roots, to want to be different, “to be like them-

“American and WASP,” and this causes her to slowly better her life through mistakes. She falls in love with Peter, gets pregnant, has an abortion and then completely distances herself from her family because with them, she cannot be who she wants to be. Trying to make a living, she stoops low enough to almost be a prostitute and then meets Andrew McBride who takes her life another step higher and so her life continues. Her struggles take her up to the point where she has twelve successful children and lives happily. In the end, the reader is shown that Rachel changes for the better because of the choices she made and not because she adhered to any specific religion or identified with any specific ethnicity. Rhetorically, McBride uses different language, specifically diction and syntax, to characterize the different phases of her life. The beginning is characterized by plenty of negative words and short declarative sentences, while times of struggle have look brooding sentences dotted with words of sadness and times of happiness are marked by short emotional sentences filled with joyous diction. James' narrative is similar in that he begins his life is confusion not knowing which side to settle with and at the end of the story he is calm and has accepted his identity. He begins his narrative with an eclectic collection of memories about his father's death, about the lack of space in their house, about the hobbies his mother took up after his father's death and about how he was embarrassed by his Jewish mother. On one side he is profoundly in touch with his black side and on the other he despises it. For example he is teased the white, predominantly Jewish school that he is sent to and he seethes with anger and shame but at the same time, when his fellow students think that he is good at dancing and encourage him to perform for them, he does to happily, proudly. He switches between the two sides frequently. When his father dies, he pushes his immediate family away and lives with his step sister and sees the real black life through encounters with the Chicken Man and others. On the other hand, he also traces out his white Jewish roots through his mother. His anger and frustration at this split within him self come through in the diction and the short powerful sentences. He understands his mother's struggles and identifies with them. He begins to realize that she controlled her life, not her religion or her race and as he reaches this realization through his struggles as a black son of a white mother, as a

Christian son of a Jewish mother, he understands that it does not matter. He is what he makes of himself: the color of water. A very significant part of the book shows that he reached this realization. His best friend is a Jew and he becomes the best man at his wedding and McBride's mother attends his wedding and fully participates in it. Rhetorically, the event marks the climax of all the struggles, religious and ethnic, of the McBride family. The son's life rising from confusion and ambivalence, facilitated by his struggles, moves towards a calm self realization much like the mother's life and this change is shown by the various types of diction and syntax McBride uses to tell his story. One other rhetorical strategy that McBride employs is the arrangement of the chapters and parallelism. He places related chapters together to juxtapose the life of his mother and that of himself. This allows the reader to observe the parallelism in the two lives and to understand the significance Rachel's life had on McBride's. For example, McBride places the chapter titled “Shul” and “School” next to each other with each giving the reader a view of the problems they faced in school. Placed in the beginning of the book, both of these chapters fall in the part of the book where both of the characters are struggling and are trying to fit in but are rejected. Another example is “A Jew Discovered” and “Dennis.” Both of these chapters are about acceptance. In “A Jew Discovered,” the author is in a way rejected by the Jewish faith and in “Dennis,” McBride's mother tells about how some black people “never did accept [her].” These parallelisms act as a kind of foreshadowing device. Rachel's story starting in pieces comes together in her renouncing her religion and becoming a woman of mixed race and being proud of it and since McBride's story follows more or less the same pattern, it only makes sense that his gets to the same conclusion. McBride uses very simple rhetorical strategies brilliantly to put forth his point that race and ethnicity do not matter. He writes his narrative and presents his mother narrative using vivid diction and appropriate syntax and through them he shows how both mother and son grew their lives out from confusion. He uses the same type of diction to show their initial confusion about their race and ethnicity and similar syntax involving long pensive and brooding sentences to show their struggles and

finally, quick emotional sentences to show their happy realization phase. These similarities between the two narratives are further highlighted by arrangement of chapters. There are numerous pairs of chapters that have the same focus in both narratives. These chapters foreshadow the events of McBride's life through that of his mother and the similarities between them. These rhetorical strategies come together to explain McBride's purpose in writing the book: to share his realization. He understood, through his struggles and through his mother's life that what he was was completely up to him and his religion and ethnicity did not matter.