Selected Paragraph

This is Adah speaking on page 365 in response to Ruth May's death.
"I was not present at Ruth May's birth but i have seen it now, because I saw each step of it played out in reverse at the end of her life. The clsoing parenthesis, at the end of the paindrome that was Ruth May. Her final gulp of air as hungry as a baby;s first breath. That last howling scream, exactly life the first, and then at the end a fixed, steadfast moving backward out of this world. After this howl, wide-eyed silence without breath. Her bluish face creased with a pressure closing in, the neeeear proximity of the other-tan-;ofe that crowds down around the edges of living. Her eyes closed up tightly, and her swollen liped clamped shut. Her spine curved, and her limbs drew in more and more tightly until she seemed impossibly small. While we watched without comprehension, she moved away to where none of us wanted to follow. Ruth May shrank back through the narrow passage between this brief fabric of light and all the rest of what there is for us: the long waiting. Now she will wait the rest of the time. It will be exactly as long as the time that passed before she was born."

Besdies being incredibly poetic and really just an amazing parallel to draw between the life of Ruth May and her love of palindromes, this passage of Adah's reaction to Ruth Mays "closing parenthesis" is very interesting. Her idea of after-life contradicts those of her fathers, the one he preaches of, and the one she had been taught (im sure.) This paragraph was preceeded by and again followed by the same sentence, "Beacuse I could not stop for death-He kindly stopped for me." A famous opening line of one of Emily Dickonsons poems. This line seems like a typicall one for Adah to say and its placement is as well, parenthesizing the paragrah describing the "palindrome that was Ruth May." This passage was written with some real witt, (snaps for kingsolver) and is definately my favorite in Bel and the Serpent, its the epitome of Adah's intelligence, if it has one at all.