Answer:
She believes that an individual can either give full attention to a task or stop taking it because giving it partial attention does not make meaning. To prove her argument, Goodman uses the example of a five-year-old child with too much sugar in his body yet he is taking more than one task, thanks to technology.
In this case, the child crashes and falls into a deep sleep due to exhaustion, which displays the negative impact of technology. This example presents the idea that the ability to slow things down and focus on a given task at a time is a human virtue that should be emulated.
In addition, Goodman expresses her disappointment in her letter, which results from her observation that modern people are caught up with little devices and computers such that they forget their personalities and emotions.
She is disappointed because most people in the modern society have allowed technology to take control of their lives, while snail mail and its meanings are quickly fading away. Due to lack of authenticity in communication, the world is quickly falling apart.Explanation:
In her opening paragraphs, the author uses the framing device as an anecdote setting, which helps her to outline and set the mood for the entire argument. Goodman believes that handwritten letters are authentic and sentimental compared to emails.
Communication than handwritten letter, the author attempts to show that the same technology tears people apart because individuals do not mean what they say when communicating through these technologies.
From her experience, Goodman says that lack of meaning and truthfulness in communication through technologies is common because people tend to do things fast without giving much thought to what they are doing. She argues that this is due to human inability to giver partial attention to a given task.
Assonance is the poetic device that is illustrated by the line, "all night long, by a fire-fly lamp".
The facts that are told at the end of the story are in sharp contrast to those that unleash the tragedy that Desiree and her son have to live. Only in the last few lines we discover that her husband knows the true cause of the dark color of the child's skin, which derives from the color of his own mother and has nothing to do with the unknown facts that cover the real origin of Desiree, since his filiation was not known from the beggining.
The irony is graphed in the fact that Desiree's husband could not have ignored that his mother was a dark-skinned woman, as he lived with her for the first eight years of his life and in addition to that, in the end, we also got to know that he was in possession of that letter that informed him the truth, in the probably event that he had forgotten it over the years.
The mistreatment he gave to his slaves was then the most important contradiction, although we can observe that his character softens after the birth of his son, even so having to see him daily was probably a permanent reminder of a shame he was trying to leave behind.
Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell was the first woman to receive a medical degree. She opened doors for womens education in medicine.
