30 pages • 1 hour read
Alice WalkerTo Hell with Dying
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1988A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Imagery
The imagery used in the story serves numerous purposes, including mimicking the passage of time and maturity of the narrator through tone and word use. Her representation of Mr. Sweet and his home gradually changes depending on which stage her life the narrator is describing. For example, she initially describes Mr. Sweet using more positive words that illicit feelings of innocence, such as “kinky hair” and comparing his moustache to “Spanish moss” (Paragraph 1). Meanwhile, his final description is more mature and solemn: “the old face, the wrinkled forehead, the red lips” (Paragraph 20). This is blunt and realistic. The way the narrator views Mr. Sweet changes fundamentally when faced with his death, and these minor details help contribute to that development.
Foreshadowing
Mr. Sweet’s literal death is foreshadowed throughout the story, such as when his hair is noted as “dead white” and when he suffers a stroke, but this impending reality can easily be ignored when focusing on the repetitive metaphorical deaths he deals with through depression. Due to this, his real death shocks the narrator, even though she has noticed his signs of aging her whole life. She and her family worried that Mr. Sweet would suddenly “take off one day and leave us” (Paragraph 14), but his death was actually more gradual and predictable. By contrast, the one who did take off and leave was the narrator, having developed a certainty that Mr. Sweet would always be there for her.
Setting
The story is set in the narrator’s childhood home in Georgia during the era of segregation and at the start of the civil rights movement. These facts are gathered partially by details in the story, but also by knowing the story is most likely autofiction, and Alice Walker grew up in Georgia during this time.
The home of Mr. Sweet is both literally and figuratively a reference to the era of slavery in America. As a member of an older generation than the narrator, his unwilling residence on a neglected cotton farm shows his own temporal and psychological closeness to the era of slavery compared to the narrator and her parents, who are further removed from that time. The narrator and her brother are eventually able to leave the community for college and the military, respectively, showing how their generation developing amid the civil rights movement enabled them to accomplish more than the preceding generations.
The “death room” in Mr. Sweet’s house is the only room to be given an alternative title. It is where his deep bouts of depression occurred, and thus where revivals were performed. Housing a room made for death in a symbol representing the legacy of slavery in the segregation-era South alludes to the history of suffering attached to the location, as well as the spirituality and community that had to exist within it in order to survive.
First-Person Narration
The use of the first-person narration helps evoke empathy for Mr. Sweet and the narrator. The use of past tense—as the narrator is reflecting on all of the story from an unnamed point in her future—provides a lens to relate to the nostalgia for childhood and innocence that helps shape the story.
The early paragraphs of the story describe Mr. Sweet as an emotionally unstable alcoholic, faults that are not generally considered to be child friendly. Yet, through first-person narration, Walker portrays Mr. Sweet through the eyes of a child, allowing the comfort and joy the narrator feels in his presence to shine brighter than his instability. Mr. Sweet’s flaws come off instead as quirks or struggles for which she sympathizes with him. Mr. Sweet’s drunkenness provides an avenue to play and wrestle, and his depression opens a space to express love.
This form of narration also provides the foundation for other literary devices, such as diction. The dialect used is meant to be African American English of the era, and its distinctive slang, tone, and grammar help build a sense of identity and setting in a story that otherwise spends very little time describing the narrator.
Related Titles
By Alice Walker
