Gloomy sky

Gustavo Quintero
December 7, 2007
English 48A
Journal #28 Rebecca Harding Davis

Quote:
"A dirty canary chirps desolately in a cage beside me. Its dream of green fields and sunshine is a very old dream-almost worn out, I think"(Davis 2599).


Summary:
Davis sets the atmosphere for her short story in the beggining of the story. Davis is descriing the polluted conditions that the steel workers and the city's residents live in.


Response:
From the reading this city does not sound like an ideal place to live in. In fact it sounds like a dump. The air is dark and full of thick black smoke. Absoulutly everything is covered in a black soot. Even the poor and innocent canary is dirty. The canary is crying out for help but there is noone to hear his cries. The dirty canary almost seems like a metaphor for the people in this city. They are all literally dirty and trapped by there surroundings. They are living dead end lives. This is quite a depressing way to place the setting of a story in. I think Davis does it on purpose beacause it plays with the psychi of the reader. The reader is brought into this dismal enviroment that Davis creates so that they will have more sympathy towards the people that live here. By the way that Davis described the city it immediaelty reminded me of the pollution problem that Los Angeles had a few years ago. I can remember visiting Los Angeles several times as a small boy only to be stricken by just how dark and polluted the sky was. I can remeber coming up to L.A. from highway 5 and knowing it was L.A. because of the dark gray sky that enveloped the city. I know that L.A. is not the same extreme as the city in Davis' story but it reminds me of L.A.