Alice Walker's short story Am I Blue?

Alice Walker's short story  Am I Blue?, is on the surface, an assertion about how humans treat animals and the right's of animals. However, on a deeper level, Walker is making a very powerful argument about how human animals treat each other much the same way they treat non human animals. We will examine how Walker organizes her points, and analyze those points as they relate to her argument. Human beings have always prided themselves with being the most intelligent species of animals on Earth. While no one, that people know of, is saying otherwise, even we humans cannot deny that other species of animals have higher intelligence than what we give them credit for. Animals are very social, interactive creatures, and if you look closely, they have characteristics and personalities much like our own.

   Alice Walker's extraordinary use of imagery effectively creates scenes of beautiful country life in the readers mind.  'Am I Blue?' is about a horse named Blue. The author describes Blue by comparing him to human beings and human experiences. At the start, the author talks about feeding apples to Blue. She says that oftentimes, Blue just waits by the apple tree until someone comes, then he snorts or whines as if to say ' I want an apple'. However, like any human being, Blue gets very lonely and bored whenever no one is around. He is the only horse being kept in the area. The author then reflects on how animals are 'completed creations'. This mean that their personalities are constant despite changes in their appearance and their environment. They are who they are since the day they were born. Blue, being a social animal, can only look forward to people feeding him apples, and that makes him very lonely and bored.

 One day, Blue gets a companion, a brown horse. The author notices that Blue is happier with his new friend and he does not frequent the apple tree as much as he used to. People often behave like Blue did too. When something or someone new comes into our lives, we often try to spend time learning more about that person to break the monotony of daily life. However, we are told that life has its ups and downs. For Blue, his down came when his companion was taken away after they had mated and she had conceived. The author compares Blue's look of pain and despair to the slaves whose family members have been taken away from them. The look in Blue's eyes are strikingly human.

This essay then dwells on how nothing is ever as it seems. The animals, like Blue, represent images and ideas for us. For example, a white horse in the meadows gives us an image of freedom, but we never know the real condition or state that animal is in. The author provides more examples but the her point is that people always talk about equality, freedom and justice for everyone. Unfortunately, we seem to have forgotten that those idealism can, and should, also apply to animals. This story is quite beautiful in a way that the author describes how even animals can feel. How she relates the apple at the end is also very clever. I liked this story a lot because we, humans, can feel what Blue is feeling... which is in fact, being Blue. We all have experiences in life which makes us Blue. Alice Walker conveys her high regard towards animal rights through the use of many different rhetorical devices such as description, anecdote, metaphor, personification, irony