Believe

I did not get to finish my response to the question about how fruit is like words and how words are like fruit during the class time, so I thought I would do that here. Fruit is like words in the story “Fruit and Words” because they both require belief in them and the idea of this little store in order to be real. I think that this idea is also a reason why this story can be identified as “magical realism”. In so many fairy tales, the main characters need to believe in the magic in order for it to be real. When the narrator first walks into the little shack with all the fruit, she believes with all her heart that this is real, because she needs a mango. She needs this fruit to be real in order to feed her craving. She also believes in the first words that she sees: the solids. They are sitting right there in front of her. She can physically touch them in order to prove that they are real. As she gets led around on the tour, the narrator slowly begins to lose that belief in the words. She suspects that LAKE and OCEAN might in fact be TAP, and she feels like the lady who made them might have cheated in making these words because some of them were in glass tubing. But she does believe that BLOOD is real. As they move onto the gases, the narrator loses her belief in those words altogether because she can no longer see them. The science she learned is combating with her will to believe in the idea of gases formed into words. This starts the crumbling effect of her belief in the whole shop. She is no longer held captivated by these words and the beautiful fruit. She gets nervous at the sight of CAT and DOG in the solids group. As she drives away from the shop, she loses the belief in all of it, and when she opens her bag of mangoes, she realizes that they have rotted away due to the fact that the narrator doesn’t believe in the magic anymore.

The words in this story are like the fruit, again in the fact that they both have to be believed in in order to be real, but also in the fact that they both become weapons by the end of the story. The narrator throws NUT back at the woman in the shop as she calls her a nut, and the woman in the shop throws fruit at the narrator. I feel this is significant because the narrator throws what is least important to her at the woman, but the words are the most important to the woman from the shop. The same happens when the woman begins throwing fruit at the narrator. The fruit is much more important to the narrator. We don’t see her throwing her bag of mangoes at the woman. And we don’t see the woman throwing the words at the narrator, except for the word BLOOD, which I believe was a measured action because the woman could tell that BLOOD really made the narrator nervous. The fruit is much less important to the woman from the shop. She gets it as a trade, and sells it to get people to come into her shop, so she can get them to buy some words. I also think that the fruit is much more real to the narrator, and the words are much more real to the woman.

(Sarah Jaworowicz, Post 12)