35 pages • 1 hour read
ZZ PackerBrownies
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 2003A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Allusion and Doppelganger
The names Daphne and Laurel allude to Greek mythology. In Greek mythology, Apollo falls in love with Daphne; however, Daphne does not reciprocate this love. In order to hide from Apollo, Daphne turns herself into a laurel tree. If there are moments in “Brownies” where Daphne and Laurel seem to exist as “stranger twins” to each other, as doppelgangers, by the end of the story, they merge, sharing an understanding of the confounding machinations of racism.
Conceit
In literature, a conceit is when two very different things are compared and associated, usually with the help of an extended metaphor. In “Brownies,” the two groups of girls—Snot’s Brownies and Troop 909, the latter of which is comprised of developmentally-disabled white girls—are compared.
At a craft level, Packer uses this conceit to “turn” the story, moving the narrative from rising tension to a moment where the tension cannot build more, and a resolution to the conflict must be found. In this case, it’s the realization by Snot’s Brownie troop that Troop 909 is comprised of developmentally-disabled individuals who are not racist.
Denouement
Denouement is a French word that literally means “to untie.” In literature, it’s a device in which the conflict of the story is resolved. Typically, a denouement concludes the narrative, and follows the story’s climactic moment, in which the tension of the plot is at its peak.
In “Brownies,” the denouement is especially interesting. In theory, the story could end with the scene in the restroom, after Snot’s troop has discovered that Troop 909 is comprised of developmentally-disabled individuals. The plot of the story has concluded: all that is left is for Packer to get her cast of remaining characters offstage. However, instead of doing this, Packer affords Snot an opportunity to tell her story, one that does not relate to what happened at Camp Crescendo as much as it does the wider thematic content of “Brownies”.
In this manner, Packer foregrounds the broader, thematic brushstrokes of the story at its conclusion, ahead of offering a simple “out” at a plot level.
The First-Person “Observer” Narrator
While Snot is the character who tells the story, and through whose perspective the reader sees the details of the narrative world Packer creates, it’s also fair to say that Snot is not the protagonist of the narrative.
If anything, the two Brownie troops function, respectively, as collective protagonist and antagonist, with these roles switching once the story’s central conceit is revealed to the reader: if the Troop 909 girls are believed, for much of the story, to be privileged and racist, by the end of “Brownies,” they are the victims of Snot’s troop’s cruel intentions.
