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Maturity In Clarice Lispector's Remnants Of Carnival

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A Young Girl’s Desire For Maturity in Clarice Lispector’s “Remnants of Carnival” Desire is a sense of longing some people have that motivates them towards achieving their goals. The aspect of desire can stem from an individual’s personal insecurities, such as wanting to change their appearance to fit in with a popular crowd. In “Remnants of Carnival,” Clarice Lispector employs various literary devices such as pathos and juxtaposition in order to emphasize a young girl’s fixed desire to become more mature and the various challenges she faces in an attempt to do so. The dominant emotion that Clarice Lispector seeks to invoke in her readers is desire. To portray this, the author effectively makes appeals to pathos at the start …show more content…

A contrast is shown between the protagonist’s melancholy self and the jolly atmosphere of Carnival in the line where Lispector states, “ I ran and ran, bewildered, alarmed, amid streamers, confetti and shouts from Carnival. Other people’s merriment stunned me.” In this line, it is shown that the protagonist is conflicted when she views the brilliance of Carnival but noticing that her melancholy self seems to no longer connect with the other joyous participants. She had previously thirsted for the one chance to participate in Carnival, but ends up running from her desires to return to her personal obligations at home. Even though she was dressed the part, the young girl’s disheartenment led her to feel out of place. The contrast between the emotion that the protagonist feels and the merriment of the atmosphere stuns her, showing that she is unsure if anyone else in the crowd is in the same situation she is in. The looks of true happiness of everyone around her and being able to live in the moment is a feeling too foreign for her to grasp. This tells the protagonist that even though her desire to be at carnival is incredibly strong, she knows that it is only

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