‘WHAT?’ began one boy’s reaction paper. ‘I dont thank I be so kalm if my moms dyed.’

Before the phone rang, I had scribbles ‘AMEN BROTHER!’ in red pencil, in the margin of his single-spaced, handwritten, steam-of-consciuosness masterpiece. But after hanging up with my father’s wife, I wrote him a long note scolding him for oversimplifying and being careless with his spelling. Then I gave him a C.

Danticat 4

After reading on in the except, I learned that Danticat used Nadia’s students’ work to foreshadow her experience and thoughts through this tragic turn of events. Taking a closer look into the quoted section above, Nadia felt sympathy for her student’s reaction prior to the phone call with her stepmother, however, after that conversation her perspective on the situation shifted. for instance, she couldn’t ‘drop everything and come to Miami”. But this only expressed her outer feeling. But Danticat illustrating that Nadia then focused on a different perspective of her students’ work, also illustrates that this was kinda doing on in Nadia’s head as well after the phone call. She couldn’t just oversimplify the dying state of her father and needed to really hone down on it. just like how her students couldn’t just oversimplify the intensive even of the mother dying in the book and hone down on his spelling. We can see that this student’s work was truly a foreshadowing for Nadia’s path because later on, she inquired an intense meeting with her mother and eventually hone down into actually going to meet her father that was dying. Additionally, towards the end of the except, when she made it to Miami, she states that she wanted to see her father but remembered the C-student’s paper in which he was mad at people for saying it doesn’t matter when you die and closed he paper by saying ‘it do matter. Avery sekond kount.” and that Nadia will raise his grade. This incident shows that her students’ thoughts in their work are foreshadowing how Nadia feels because at that moment when she wanted to see her father she realized how every second counted. All in all, this was an interesting way for Danticat to foreshadow the events of Nadia’s interaction in the event of her father dying. Nadia needed confused throughout this except so this foreshadowing technique of giving the reader a heads up through the work of her student was clever and truly helped me have a deeper understanding in this reading.