Analysis Of The Plastic Pink Flamingo: A Natural History By Jennifer Price

In the pink flamingo's passage, Jennifer Price cleverly and effectively describes how American Society has always behaved and the virtues they hold important. Price successfully uses multiple rhetorical strategies to convince her audience how America is infatuated with claiming a position where the are regarded as high class and successful.

Jennifer Price in the essay “The Plastic Pink Flamingo: A Natural History” explains her point of view of the American Culture. Price supports her explanation by providing examples and explaining the history of the American Culture and the flamingos. The author’s purpose is to point out the greed in order to further explain her opinion on the American Culture. Price entertains her audience by mocking the American Culture by using symbolism, ethos, and tone in her essay.

represent her opinion of the United States as a whole. Price writes “In ancient Egypt, it

Established magazine writer Jennifer Price’s essay, “The Plastic Pink Flamingo: A Natural History”, argues that America’s culture is excessively concerned with material items, and much less concerned with individuality. Price addresses her opinion of American culture through syntax, diction, and tone. Price conveys her opinion of American culture through her use of syntax. In the second paragraph, Price discusses America’s past according to flamingos, crafting her sentence using exceptional syntax to reveal her true feelings towards the United States.

In Jennifer Price’s essay, “The Plastic Pink Flamingo: A Natural History” (1999), she proclaims that the United States has embraced the pink flamingo and its history. The author utilizes benevolent diction, enlightening metaphor, and alluding allusion. Price’s purpose to get people to understand the beauty of the pink flamingo in order to show her view of how the flamingo changed the culture of the United States. The author writes in a admirable tone for her audience of American citizens.

Jennifer Price’s essay “The Plastic Pink Flamingo: A Natural History” introduces the origins of the famous lawn ornaments. Price’s purpose is to educate about the hypocrisy of American culture and how many live a life of extravagance and fortune without raising a finger. She adopts an informative tone in the first paragraph that shifts to a sarcastic tone in order to exemplify the state of insincerity of the American ways to the citizens of America.

Price continues building her portrayal of United States culture as superficial and materialistic with detailed descriptions of household items. By downsizing from large-scale hotels described in her first two paragraphs to small-scale household items in her third paragraph, Price exemplifies the materialistic ways of United States culture. Americans purchased “washing machines, cars, and kitchen countertops” in the various shades of pink. The desire of Americans to own the audacious color displays their need for material possessions. Price describes the shades of pink available,

In the essay “The Plastic Pink Flamingo: A Natural History” by Jennifer price; the author shows implicitly her idea and point of view on the topic on the United States culture. The idea is that the U.S.A‘s culture is very overbearing, this is shown by her view on how Americans are so worried with their image that is seen by society. Price uses many writing techniques to express her view on United States culture, by the usage of diction, tone, and symbolism Price is able to convey her analysis on the greed and the corruption occurring in the American culture.

Price's use of similes/metaphors reveal her views on American culture. For instance, at the end of her essay, Price compares the plastic flamingo to a real flamingo. However, instead of describing the real flamingo as wading across a sea of water, she describes it as “wading across an inland sea of grass.” (line 61) This shows Americans clouding up the image of a real flamingo in order to suit their own interests. Instead of having flamingos in water like they are meant to be, they make fake flamingos to display on lawns in order to exhibit “leisure and extravagance.” (line 19) Another example would be when Price describes many flamingo based buildings such as motels, restaurants, and lounges that sprang up all across the country in the 1950s. (line 26) She compares these flamingo based buildings to “semiotic sprouts” (line 28) that just shout out “flamingo” in order to take advantage of the flamingo trend. These buildings using the “namesake Flamingo” (line 27) adopted this new trend and threw out the old in order to “stand out” (line 25) and draw in “riches.” (line 22) Thus, this shows the adaption of the new trend, no matter how much it had deviated from the norm, in order

Throughout “Consider the Lobster”, an article written by David Foster Wallace about the 2004 Maine Lobster Festival, Wallace demonstrates that not all of his writing is clear and concise. The author does this through his various viewpoints in the article, which allow him to capture the reader 's attention. A particular sentence that captures the initiation of Wallace’s writing is, “The suppers come in styrofoam trays, and the soft drinks are iceless and flat, and the coffee is convenience-store coffee in more styrofoam, and the utensils are plastic (there are none of the special long skinny forks for pushing out the tail meat.)” (Pg. 239). Within this sentence, Wallace describes the many parts of the festival and how they show the poor side of the festival. Between the cheap styrofoam trays and the flat drinks, the festival gives off a poor vibe to the reader.

In sprawling suburbs across America, lies the remnants of a different era. In those few houses left relatively untouched and never remodeled, one can see the markings of the 1950s, an era of kitchens and bathrooms decorated in a monochrome of Hot Pink, just like the plastic pink lawn flamingos. In her essay, Jenniffer Price discusses the history of the flamingos in the United States and uses them as a symbol of America’s culture. Through her use of diction and imagery in the essay “The Plastic Pink Flamingo: A Natural History”, Jennifer Price characterizes American Culture as materialistic.

The author uses tone and images throughout to compare and contrast the concepts of “black wealth” and a “hard life”. The author combines the use of images with blunt word combinations to make her point; for example, “you always remember things like living in Woodlawn with no inside toilet”. This image evokes the warmth of remembering a special community with the negative, have to use outdoor facilities. Another example of this combination of tone and imagery is “how good the water felt when you got your bath from one of those big tubs that folk in Chicago barbecue in”. Again the author’s positive memory is of feeling fresh after her bath combined with a negative, the fact that it was a barbecue drum.

The novel The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, sends the message to Americans that outward appearances can be deceptive. Fitzgerald saw that America had no identity and blamed it on Americans because of everyone’s constant effort to be seen as something that they are not. He uses the characters and their past as a way to expose America's misleading appearances and colors to emphasize the specific things that are being covered in American society. Fitzgerald uses the colors white, gold, yellow, blue, and green, to teach America that there is no such thing as an American identity because of deceiving appearances that they have created.

One of the ways the death of the American Dream is demonstrated in the Great Gatsby is through “enchanted colors.” Yellow is the color of gold, and traditionally symbolizes wealth, beauty, and materialism. After Jay Gatsby becomes rich, with a mansion of his own, everything is yellow. Gatsby’s tie is yellow; his car is yellow, the buttons on Daisy’s dress are yellow. At one point in the novel, Nick Carraway even describes some flowers smelling like gold, as it states in chapter five, “...the sparkling odor of jonquils and the frothy odor of hawthorn and plum blossoms and the pale gold odor of kiss-me-at-the-gate.” All of these yellow and gold things suggest that the Jazz Age was a time in which materialism was the most important thing, and being wealthy was all that mattered. In the 1920’s, and still today, the American Dream was, and is, to be wealthy, and to attain something greater that almost seems out of reach.

In a short story by Alice Munro, “A Red Dress 1946”, Color Imagery is used to represent the inner feelings of the narrator and how she wants to be blue. The narrator’s dream is to live a blue life, a life where she is just like everyone else. Munro writes, “when I was unaware of the world’s opinion. Now, grown wiser, I wished for dresses like those my friend Lonnie had, bought at Beale’s store”(1). Lonnie is able to buy things like her dresses from stores which just makes the narrator want to be blue. The narrator wants to be blue even more because of how Lonnie and many other girls can buy things but if she wants a nice dress she can’t buy it she