One of the most beautiful elements of “Mr. Green” by Robert Olen Butler is the many instances of detailed description, where Butler was able to perfectly capture a feeling or scene using figurative language. For example, Butler wrote,
“I felt a strange thing inside me, a recoiling, like I’d stepped barefoot on a slug, but how can you recoil from your own body?”
It wasn’t enough to just write about how heart-wrenching it must have been, to have your grandfather tell you that his spirit is going to suffer a terrible afterlife, and that your prayers otherwise mean nothing because you’re a girl. The reader could imagine, in a vague way, what the main character might have felt, but through that one beautiful little phrase, “like I’d stepped barefoot on a slug,” Butler put the reader right there with her, feeling that terrible feeling alongside her.
Sometimes, in the spring, when I let my dogs out to our backyard before the sun has come up, I step barefoot on a slug. It’s a gross feeling that part of you wants to overreact to; it makes you you want to scrape your foot against sandpaper, or perhaps plunge it in a bucket of boiling water to sterilize it. But what you end up doing is wiping your foot off on the floor, letting your dogs back into the house, and forgetting the feeling entirely until you step barefoot on another slug.
Butler used this simile perfectly, because the main character reacts in much the same way: she cries, but, in the end, is too young to do anything about what her grandfather says about women. She describes other memories of him tenderly, until, on his deathbed, he once more makes comments about women being stupid and foolish and she feels the stepped-barefoot-on-a-slug feeling again.
“‘Do you hear them talking?’ he said. He nodded toward the door and he obviously meant my mother and grandmother.
‘Yes,” I said. He frowned.
‘How foolish they sound. Chattering and yammering. All the women sound like that. You don’t want to grow up sounding like all these foolish women, do you?’
I did not know how to answer his question. I wanted very much to be like my mother, and when my grandfather said this, I felt the recoiling begin inside me and the tears begin to rise.”
His comments change the way she views him, but not to the point where she remembers him poorly. She speaks of more memories of him tenderly, and seems to miss him, though certainly age has helped her realize the sexist nature of his comments. This explains her treatment of Mr. Green towards the end of his life.