The found poem is a multimedia product created by the combination of words and phrases picked out of the short story “Thank You Ma’am ” and relevant, descriptive pictures that convey the conflicts inside this story.
In the story “Thank You Ma’am”, Langston Hughes presents two contradicting conflicts. One of them takes place in the story’s rising action and is an external conflict. The protagonist, Roger, at night time, tries to steal from a woman with a large purse because his poor family couldn’t afford his wanting. Here stands the external conflict from page 1 to page 2 between Roger and the woman. As reflected in my poem, I chose most of the verbs that were used to describe the conflict such as “snatch her purse” and “kicked him”, which creates the scene of character versus character conflict. You can also see that my poem’s background is divided into two halves, the top representing the external conflict, and the bottom representing internal.
The top picture illustrates the scenery when Roger tries to steal the purse and associates with the words chosen from the first conflict. In contrast, the second conflict takes place in the climax of the story and is the internal conflict that reveals the theme of this story. On pages 3, 4, and 5, the phrases “he looked at the door, the door was open, – looked at the woman, the woman, trust him,- looked at the door, he could run, run, run,” display the hesitation and inner struggle of Roger deciding whether to stay or not, which is the internal conflict of Roger between him afraid of being punished but also not wanting to disappoint the woman’s trust in him. The bottom two pictures of the poem show his choices: run away(the open door) or stay to live up to the trust of the woman(picture of hand).
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