GELOURWEL TOCMO

GE 114 BSMar-E 1 Antares Summer AY2020-2021

1:00-3:00 pm MTWTh 9:00-10:00 am F Jireh M. Lumayno

ACTIVITY 2 – TEXT/STORY ANALYSIS

1. Characters
Johnsy is a young artist from California. She becomes seriously ill with pneumonia
and believes she will die when the last leaf of the vine outside her window falls. Sue is
also a young artist from Maine. She is very close to Johnsy and cooks for her, cares for
her, and financially supports her during her illness. Old Behrman was a painter who
lived on the first floor of their house. He was past sixty. He had had no success as a
painter. The doctor is a busy, older man who attends to Johnsy and Behrman. He
diagnoses Johnsy with mental as well as physical illness, and he was the one who told
Sue that Behrman died of pneumonia.
The characterization method used is indirect characterization. I can say so
because the author did not precisely describe what the character is like.

2. Setting
The story takes place in Greenwich Village, New York City, during a winter.

3. Conflict
The type of conflict is a man vs self conflict. The main conflict of the story is that
Johnsy has superstitiously linked her fate to the fate of the last ivy leaf on the vine,
which is bound to fall. One evidence is when the doctor said “But when a sick person
begins to feel that he’s going to die, half my work is useless. Talk to her about new
winter clothes. If she were interested in the future, her chances would be better.” That
was an indication that one of the main characters, Johnsy, is dealing with something
within herself. And to be able to overcome such conflict, she should be able to deal with
her mindset. When she was able to fix herself, she regains her sense of hopefulness
about the future.

4. Theme
The story's main theme is 'hope and health.' The leaf from the tree outside the
window represents Johnsy's will to live; when the last leaf falls from the vine, she
informs Sue that she will die. Mr. Behrman, their next-door neighbor, laughs at the idea
and paints the illusion of a "last leaf" on the wall outside Johnsy's window, giving her
hope again—a gift that saves Johnsy's life by reminding her that she still has a future.
Because he went outside in a storm to paint the leaf, he gets pneumonia and dies,
which gives us a minor theme of 'friendship and sacrifice.'

5. Literary Devices
There are few literary devices present in the story. First is foreshadowing.
Foreshadowing is a literary device in which a writer foreshadows what will happen later
in the story. Behrman's declaration to Sue that he will paint a masterpiece one day
foreshadows his courageous and selfless act of painting the last leaf. Another one is
metonymy - is when something is used to represent something related to it. "Streets" is
a metonymical substitution for "people" in the phrase "the streets have gone wild," in the
first part of the story. Personification is the representation of a thing or abstraction as a
person. The narrator personifies an illness by referring to pneumonia as "Mr.
Pneumonia" and attributing a lack of chivalry to the personified illness.

6. Point of View
"The Last Leaf" is narrated from a third-person’s perspective. The narrator only
serves as an observer. The narrator stays out of the action and simply describes what
he sees. The narrator knows very little about the characters and their thoughts and
feelings.