Essay:

Conflicts in Sweetgum Slough

Sweetgum Slough is a short story describing a memoir of a young girl named Clair Karssiens, who hailed from a tiny backwater in Florida named Sweetgum Slough. The events that are described in the memoir are indicated during the great depression of 1930s (Karssiens, 2009). This tiny place in Florida was an isolated, rural hamlet that provided the memoir with the title in a vivid and exuberant method through which a series of events of vignettes about how life was, during the Great Depression, specifically, in a poor area. This paper will discuss conflict of Man vs. Society.

Man vs. Society

This type of external conflict or struggle exists when characters struggle against the morays of their government or culture. This means that authors create works where specific characters struggle or battle with oppressive cultures, battle evil or certain social aspects that may not be taken positively by the character. In Sweetgum Slough, this type of conflict is represented between Karssiens and her new school. In some of the pages of the book, the author writes about her-room schoolhouse experiences in a detailed and elaborate style that evokes the reader’s mind. She described her classmates such as Delano Whatley (Karssiens, 2009). This character’s behavior did not seem to please Karssiens whose feet were always bare. Moreover, this character’s dressing style was much of a struggle with Karssiens as he wore nothing other than overalls during summer. In another school experience, Karssiens described a character or schoolmate known as Wily Belle, who always kept his notes in licentious rumors (Karssiens, 2009).