Silver Water (Style)

Style

Point of View

The story is told from Violet’s first-person point of view. This means that the reader is privy only to Violet’s thoughts and observations. However, this filtering does not detract from a solid understanding of Rose’s life. Through Violet’s eyes, the readers see Rose’s overwhelming pain, sadness, and beauty. Violet chooses those details that most demonstrate what her sister goes through in the ten-year course of her illness, but she also reflects on what her sister had been: “before her constant tinkling of commercials and fast-food jingle there had been Puccini and Mozart and hymns so sweet and mighty you expected Jesus to come down off his cross and clap ... there had been the prettiest girl in Arrandale Elementary School, the belle of Landmark Junior High.” Because of Violet’s clear love for her sister, the reader feels comfortable in trusting her words and her interpretations. Violet chooses fewer, yet still relevant, details to make her parents’ reactions to Rose’s tragedy poignant. Violet renders her parents as believable and sensitive, yet very distinct people.

Narration and Structure

Violet chooses to tell this story after her sister has died. This decision allows her greater flexibility than a straight-forward narrative would. Violet is able to include details and ideas that she might not have been aware of at the time the action was taking place. For instance, she acknowledges that the lie she told to her father about Rose’s outburst in the kitchen was the second of three lies she had ever told in her life; readers thus cannot overlook its significance and will more closely reflect on the action that led to the lie in the first place.

The act of looking back on Rose’s life also allows Violet to condense it. She picks out what she considers to be the more significant events and characteristics. The added perspective that Violet has because of the distance between the events and the telling of the events allows her to better shape the story, and thus better reach the reader. She can compare the outbreaks of the illness, the various doctors’ treatments, and the way that the family reacts to the different episodes. In so doing, Violet highlights the changes that Rose has gone through over the years and demonstrates what a precarious hold she has on her own life and actions. This narrative style further underscores the precarious-ness of life itself; every change in Rose’s ailment has an equivalent effect on all the members of her family.

Violet also chooses to talk about Rose as she was before the illness struck. Structurally, the story completes a full circle. Violet opens with the memory of her sister’s “crystalline” voice rising in the parking lot outside of the opera house, and ends at Rose’s funeral, remembering her fourteen-year-old sister, one year before her first breakdown, “lion’s mane thrown back and her eyes tightly closed against the glare of the parking lot lights.” This structure not only reminds the readers of the fragility of the human experience — how quickly what a person takes as the core of their life can change — but also underscores the cyclical nature of life and death.

Symbolism and Imagery

Music provides the greatest opportunities for the use of symbolism and imagery in the story. The first line of the story reads, “My sister’s voice was like mountain water in a silver pitcher; the clear, blue beauty of it cools you and lifts you beyond your heat, beyond your body.” Although Violet places her sister, in these opening paragraphs, in a brightly lit parking lot, her images choose to align Rose with those of nature. Thus Rose is presented like that voice itself, like that mountain water: pure, true, beautiful, and undamaged. This link is further emphasized in the scene in which Rose dies. She chooses to go out to the woods behind the house, where Violet follows her “wide, draggy footprints darkening the wet grass.”

The silver water of the title evokes the wet grass upon which Rose dies, as well as the purity of the water and the purity of Rose’s voice and soul. Like rushing water, “the sweet sound [of Rose’s voice] held us tight, flowing around us, eddying throughout our hearts, rising, still rising.”