Seeing him broke the cocoon of y rib cage, and my heart unfurled to fly” (Ward 5), where Esch describes her rib cage as a cocoon, and describes her heart flying.īeautiful symbolism again comes across when we read: “Mannfs taco was smooth and only his body spoke: his muscles jabbered like chickens” Ward 11). We read: “Manny threw a basketball from hand to hand. The reader finds metaphors in Esch’s language, sometimes so beautifully expressed through simple similes and symbolism that the attention of reader goes beyond Fsch’s description of her bodily experiences of her world, and reaches out to Ward’s wonderful handling of figurative language. She describes her brothers muscles, dogfights, and hunger in such a descriptive language that the reader teels as it he is seeing over her shoulders nto her world, The reader finds that Fsch narrates about her world through instinctive vision, making a blend of what she sees around her and her instinctive thoughts, and describes that blend through symbolic, evocative language. So, her body has also made her seen urn-faithfulness from somebody she loved. She has seen how it is being motherless, and now she is experiencing the pregnancy from a man Who has fallen in love with another woman. She says, “For though I’m small, know many things/ And my body is an endless eye,’ Through which, nfortunately, see evevythinr (Ward 66i Esch calls her body an endless eye, with which she sees hunger, poverry, dog fights, devastation, accidents, thefts, and finally, the Hurricane. The bodily existence of everything is important to her. She wants to touch the world, see it, hear it, taste it, and smell it, in order to love it. Esch is the eldest sister of her siblings, She gets pregnant with Mannfs child, and the reader finds that she views the world through her bodily existence. The greatest symbolism that the reader finds in the novel is Esch’s body. This paper probes into the symbolism and metaphors Ward used in the novel. Symbolism in Salvage the Bones eedenfie Emily Edenfield Dr_ Mattingly Composition 2 MaSymbolism in “Salvage the Bones” by Jesmyn Ward Jesmyn Ward, in her novel “Salvage the Bones”, has told the story ofa family that lived in Mississippi when the incident of Hurricane Katrina occurred in 2005, getting back to her own memories otthe Hurricane which she experienced in De Lisle, Mississippi, With The use of provocative symbolism throughout the novel, Ward has very interestingly narrated how the family suffered through the Hurricane, and how they spent their lives without any concern for the future.

Author of salvage the bones