The Joy Luck Club’: Critical Analysis Essay

Through the novel, The Joy Luck Club, the author Amy Tan conveys the importance of finding joy and luck in the darkest of times. As mentioned in “Feathers From A Thousand Li Away,” the four mothers, who experienced their own trials and went through much pain, came together in Kwelin and held parties to try to escape from their harsh realities. At these parties, they would have extravagant feasts, play numerous games, and tell glorious stories. These parties came to be known as “Joy Luck” since they gave joy and luck to them. Although Tan tries to use the mothers’ distressing stories to emphasize the importance of taking action to have joy and luck, the novel exudes the gloomy mood the stories convey. Amy Tan’s use of figurative language contributes to the feeling of melancholy she probes in The Joy Luck Club. Through the worrisome and pessimistic experiences of the characters, Tan uses figurative language by applying techniques such as observation and description, imagination, and adjectives that reinforce the characters’ thoughts and perceptions from their experiences, which creates the melancholy feeling the novel expresses.

By applying observation and description, Tan is able to use figurative language to indicate how Ying-Ying St. Clair’s experience of drowning affected her thoughts to create the melancholy feeling of the novel. Before Ying-Ying falls from the boat and drowns in the sea, there is a foreboding moment in which she drowns. In the second paragraph of page seventy-five, it discusses a woman taking “out a sharp, thin knife and beginning to slice open the fish bellies, pulling out the red slippery insides and throwing them over her shoulder into the lake” (Tan 75). From this brutal observation, Tan emphasizes how Ying-Ying, as a young child, accepts and normalizes the harsh reality of the world. The detailed description of fish being killed to eat adds to the melancholy feeling of the novel, and with a young child like Ying-Ying thinking and observing closely the violent

Through the novel, The Joy Luck Club, the author Amy Tan conveys the importance of finding joy and luck in the darkest of times. As mentioned in “Feathers From A Thousand Li Away,” the four mothers, who experienced their own trials and went through much pain, came together in Kwelin and held parties to try to escape from their harsh realities. At these parties, they would have extravagant feasts, play numerous games, and tell glorious stories. These parties came to be known as “Joy Luck” since they gave joy and luck to them. Although Tan tries to use the mothers’ distressing stories to emphasize the importance of taking action to have joy and luck, the novel exudes the gloomy mood the stories convey. Amy Tan’s use of figurative language contributes to the feeling of melancholy she probes in The Joy Luck Club. Through the worrisome and pessimistic experiences of the characters, Tan uses figurative language by applying techniques such as observation and description, imagination, and adjectives that reinforce the characters’ thoughts and perceptions from their experiences, which creates the melancholy feeling the novel expresses.

By applying observation and description, Tan is able to use figurative language to indicate how Ying-Ying St. Clair’s experience of drowning affected her thoughts to create the melancholy feeling of the novel. Before Ying-Ying falls from the boat and drowns in the sea, there is a foreboding moment in which she drowns. In the second paragraph of page seventy-five, it discusses a woman taking “out a sharp, thin knife and beginning to slice open the fish bellies, pulling out the red slippery insides and throwing them over her shoulder into the lake” (Tan 75). From this brutal observation, Tan emphasizes how Ying-Ying, as a young child, accepts and normalizes the harsh reality of the world. The detailed description of fish being killed to eat adds to the melancholy feeling of the novel, and with a young child like Ying-Ying thinking and observing closely the violent moment, it adds to it even more. In the sentence following that, Tan incorporates a simile into Ying-Ying’s observation of “the fish scales, which flew into the air like shards of glass” (Tan 75). Mentioning an added detail to her observation, such as shards of glass, shows the particular danger of the moment; it adds to the importance of how Ying-Ying must have been affected badly to be able to be immune to primitive moments like this. The last sentence of the paragraph stating, “And there was nothing else to see” (Tan 75), forebodes how there is nothing left of Ying-Ying’s innocence and joy after she drowns. When Ying-Ying drowns, she is alone without her guardian, Amah. She describes how the water first was refreshing and comfortable to her and then became frightening when she began to sink. Before the aforementioned paragraph, Ying-Ying is accepting and undisturbed by the woman cutting open the fish, but now that she is in actual danger, she is immediately alarmed by the risk of dying. She acquires the perception that anyone can be in danger and not only animals, such as fish. Humans can have the hazard of being hurt, and that makes Ying-Ying change how she sees the world, ultimately seeing it as frightening and beginning to distrust its facade of providing safety. In the last paragraph on page seventy-seven, she describes how one of the Five Evils, a snake, “wrapped around her and squeezed her body like a sponge, then tossed her into the choking air” (Tan 75). Tan uses simile by incorporating description that has the connotation of violence and danger to reinforce Ying-Ying’s perception of the world and the significant effect her experience of drowning had on her. Not only did she use simile, but she uses symbolism—Ying-Ying symbolizing the butchered fish—to give the melancholy feeling of the novel. With Ying-Ying’s personal thoughts of how she observed the butchered fish and how she felt drowning, Tan uses foreboding, simile, and symbolism to emphasize the melancholy feeling.

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In the case of Rose Hsu Jordan, Tan uses description to show Rose’s thoughts and perception about her mother, An-mei Hsu. When Rose and her family lost Bing to the sea, she and her mother went to the reef and used a tube hanging from a pole to try to get Bing from the cave. Rose’s illustrative description of the moment gives the anxiety that she feels when Bing is yet to be found by saying, “the bloated tube leaped up and then it was sucked in, under the wall and into a cavern” and “over and over again, it disappeared, emerged, glistening black, faithfully reporting it had seen Bing and was going back to try to pluck him from the cave” (Tan 139). Utilizing certain words and phrases such as “leaped up,” “sucked in,” “over and over again,” “disappeared,” “emerged,” “glistening black,” and “pluck him from the cave” adds to Rose’s focus and attention to find Bing. They reveal her innermost thoughts and give depth to when she perceives her mother as losing Bing. When her mother realizes she lost Bing forever, Rose regards her mother’s face as a look “that she’ll never forget” (Tan 139). The descriptive words and phrases of her description of the tube stress the impact she received from seeing her mother and her “despair and horror” (Tan 139). The language Tan uses intensifies the moment of An-mei losing her child through Rose’s perspective, adding to the melancholy feeling of the novel.

Connecting Rose’s perspective of her mother to An-mei’s perspective of her own mother, An-mei imagines how her mother turned from being joyful to dark, and Tan is able to execute this by using figurative language in the form of imagination that has a despondent connotation. When An-mei describes how “the waters changed from muddy yellow to black and the boat began to rock and groan” (Tan 247), she is reinforcing her nervous thoughts and feelings about moving to her new home in Tientsin. Her imagination made her become “fearful and sick” (Tan 247) and using transitional words such as “from and to” and “began” gives the change in her mood and feeling. As An-mei starts to drift off in thought and think about her aunt’s warning about “the dark waters that changed a person forever” (Tan 247), Tan is able to incorporate personification, which initiates her further use of imagination to cause An-mei to have fear. The figurative language about the waters turning black and the boat beginning to groan, along with An-mei’s remembrance of her aunt’s warning, makes her see and realize that her mother is also changing for the worse. Her imagination consequently allows her to perceive her mother in worrisome scrutiny, seeing her mother’s face become “dark and angry” (Tan 247). In turn, her own “thoughts became cloudy and confused” (Tan 247). Although her imagination led her to have the far-fetched suspicion about her aunt’s warning about her mother changing, it made her see the harsh reality and truth—that her life is not going to turn out for the better, and what seems to be the case, like her mother is happy to bring her to her new home, is not what it seems at all. It allowed her to connect with her mother better and maintain a deeper emotional understanding. Looking at how both Rose and An-mei were able to have a better understanding of their mothers by perceiving them through Tan’s use of figurative language reinforced by description and imagination, they were able to grasp the cruelty of their experiences, making them lose a part of their innocence, adding to the melancholy feeling the novel expresses.

Tan uses figurative language and reinforces it with adjectives to emphasize on Ying-Ying St. Clair’s thoughts, causing her to be perceptive of remembering her experience. When Ying-Ying realized that she would marry the man, who would later abandon her for an opera singer, she felt that “a knife had cut the flower’s head off as a sign” (Tan 279). The use of personification—the knife cutting the flower’s head—and symbolism—Ying-Ying being the flower—magnifies the directness that she received from her revelation of marrying her ex-husband. The knife cutting the flower’s head leaves a slight tone of forthright brutality, which is reinforced to describe Ying-Ying’s appearance at her current age. With the description of “small and pretty” feet now “swollen, calloused, and cracked at the heels” and “eyes, so bright and flashy at sixteen now yellow-stained, clouded” (Tan 279), Ying-Ying’s change from better to worse is emphasized by adjectives. By transitioning from the use of positive to negative adjectives, there is a significant impact in which describes how Ying-Ying changed and turned into a different person, adding to her perception of herself when looking back at her distressing experience of her husband abandoning her and her losing the baby. Although her appearance changed for the worse, she gained the ability to “see almost everything clearly” (Tan 279). Ying-Ying learned from her experience, and through her own perception and perspective of herself, Tan uses personification, symbolism, and adjectives to reinforce the reflection of her sorrowful thoughts, manifesting the melancholy feeling of the novel.

Through the novel, Amy Tan shows the significance of figurative language by integrating it with the thoughts and perceptions that the characters gained from their upsetting experiences with the readers, using observation and description, imagination, and adjectives to create the melancholy feeling the novel expresses. Ying-Ying St. Clair, before becoming lost, and drowned, and her experience enhanced by the use of observation and description of her negative feelings and thoughts, emphasize simile and symbolism in that particular moment. Rose Hsu Jordan and An-mei Hsu had similar experiences that consequently enabled them to have emotional understandings of their mothers, which add to the despairing feeling they had and the novel expresses through the use of description and imagination reinforcing personification. Ying-Ying St. Clair, recalling her experience of having a terrible husband and losing her baby, establishes her own change as a person and her perception of herself, using adjectives to magnify the personification and symbolism that deepen the melancholy feeling of the novel. With the characters having and sharing their harsh experiences in the novel, we, the readers, gain this deeper understanding and, perhaps, empathy with them through their innermost thoughts and intense feelings they had and kept as a part of them. Although the novel is the opposite of its title, maybe Tan wanted us to find the limited good from the bad, hence its name The Joy Luck Club, even though it wholly conveys its melancholy feeling.