An Analysis of the Essay “What is Poverty?” by Jo Goodwin Parker

An Analysis of the Essay “What is Poverty?” by Jo Goodwin Parker

Impoverishment is the condition in which one struggles to satisfy even the most intrinsic essentialities of human life. In the essay “What is poverty?” by Jo Goodwin Parker, the narrator highlights her living as a destitute and clarifies the impacts of poverty on her own life, her children’s life and how the poor are perceived by the others. The author fortifies the burden of the narrator’s conceptualization on the audience principally through her word choice, the utilization of emotive language, striking imagery and other literary techniques.

In the first two paragraphs of the essay, the narrator characterizes the effects of poverty on her own life through the use of rhetorical questions, imagery and repetition. The narrator begins by asking the question, “You ask me what is poverty?”, implying that the audience is not yet aware of what poverty really is other than its word definition. Then, the narrator initiates to solve the problem, illustrating poverty's first-hand effects on her personal life. While doing so, the narrator identifies herself as “poverty” to show that abjection is right in front of the readers’ eyes, giving them a speech, as absolute as a human being can be. Furthermore, the narrator fortifies her emphasis by utilizing terse and momentary sentences as in the case of “Listen to me.” In the second paragraph, the narrator describes her routine life embodied in destituteness. Notably, she adopts certain words, sometimes using them recurrently, so as to grasp the readers’ heed for specific ideas. The reiterative use of “money,” for instance, advocates that prosperity is an unattainable luxury for the narrator. In addition, the words “sour milk and spoiling food” suggest that the narrator is living on the verge of starvation, having a want of even foodstuff—the most fundamental necessity of all humankind. Moreover, the “smell,” the narrator portrays as is a result of poverty, reminds the audience that the narrator is so indigent that the smell normally intertwined with impoverishment has adhered itself to her as well.

In the second and third paragraphs, the narrator chiefly accentuates how bankruptcy is influencing her children’s growth. Firstly, the narrator raises a counterargument from her audience, “Anybody can be clean”; then, she refutes it, proving that it is not that simple, by milking vivid imagery and explaining how troubled her children’s life has become as a repercussion of poverty. The narrator suggests that destituteness has dire outcomes on her children’s diet and well-being. The children cannot consume decent food, in the name of as unorthodox and plain a purpose as “not using up many dishes,” the narrator contends. In addition, her “saving money to buy a jar of Vaseline” for a time as long as “two months” indicates to the economic hardships the narrator faces. Likewise, after stating that she could not afford the Vaseline, she highlights that even “two cents,” an infinitesimal amount of money for many, posed and continue to pose a peril to her and her baby’s welfare. In the fourth paragraph, the narrator creates a startling effect through her word choice and illustrations. The narrator connotes scarcity with “death,” claiming that the lack of suitable housing—a condition related with destituteness—may threaten one’s child to “die in flames,” a thespian clarification that is sure to devastate her audience. Moreover, to bolster her argument, the narrator practices adverbs of frequency such as “never,” implicitly suggesting that her children’s circumstances are at no time going to change.

In the last two paragraphs the narrator grips awareness to how the destitute, and herself, are perceived through others’ eyes. In this part of the essay the narrator clearly emphasizes the discernment between the “poor” and “everyone.” Similarly, in the fifth paragraph, the narrator explains that being destitute also leads to feeling alienated. She delineates this notion through an example. The narrator having “circled the block” for as much as “four or five times,” looking for the place she ought to visit, until “Finally” someone came out to help demonstrates the audience that as long as one is indigent, he or she will not be regarded with equal veneration as the others are. On top of that, the narrator reinforces this notion by the sentence “Everyone is busy”; by excluding herself from this “everyone,” the narrator proves that her impoverishment results in her being diverted from the common society.

Overall, in “What is poverty?”, the author employs assorted literary techniques and a prominent emotive language in the direction of efficaciously conveying how destituteness influences the narrator’s life, her children’s life and how the society perceives her family. Indeed, by attracting considerable recognition to the narrator’s situation, the author seeks to diminish poverty by exhibiting her audience the extremeness of conditions one faces when he or she is impoverished.

-Bora