What is the significance of the brown chest, and how does the narrator’s view of the chest change during the course of the story?

Exact answer from the assignment:

Explanation:

A motif is a recurring element that builds on an important idea or theme in a story. In “The Brown Chest,” the chest is the central motif. The narrator’s views about the old chest change during the story, from childhood to adulthood and old age. When the narrator is a child, the old chest represented death and decay to him. He expresses his disdain over the chest and its contents, and doesn’t want to explore it.

The chest went down and down, into the past, and he hated the feeling of that well of time, with its sweet deep smell of things unstirring, waiting, taking on the moldy flavor of time, not moving unless somebody touched them.

As an adult, the chest symbolizes his family history and he becomes interested in it. The contents of the chest are like the pieces of a puzzle, which help him understand his family’s past.

He and his younger son took out layers of blankets and plush-covered albums, lace tablecloths and linen napkins; they uncovered a long cardboard box labelled in his mother's handwriting “Wedding Dress 1925,” and, underneath that, rumpled silk dresses that a small girl might have worn when the century was young, and patent-leather baby shoes, and a gold-plated horseshoe, and faithful notations of the last century's weather kept by his grandfather's father in limp diaries bound in red leather, and a buggy-whip. A little box labelled in his mother's handwriting “Haircut July 1919” held, wrapped in tissue paper, coils of auburn hair startlingly silky to the touch.

As the narrator realizes that his son is about to marry and perhaps have his own family, he thinks about the importance these relics will hold for the future generations of his family.

Delicately but fearlessly, she lifted the lid, and out swooped, with the same vividness that had astonished and alarmed his nostrils as a child, the sweetish deep cedary smell, undiminished, cedar and camphor and paper and cloth, the smell of family, family without end.

explanation:

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