A Quilt of a Country

Content Warning: This section references terrorism.

Various types of allusion—references to well-known people, events, works of art, etc.—appear throughout the essay. Quindlen crams three into one sentence: “The Brooklyn of Francie Nolan’s famous tree, the Newark of which Portnoy complained, even the uninflected WASP suburbs of Cheever’s characters: they are ghettos, pure and simple” (3). By citing these works of American literature, Quindlen aims to dispel the notion that ethnic divisions are anything new; rather, they are well-documented in the US literary canon. Quindlen also conjures the patriotic and ubiquitous song “America the Beautiful” as she cites the verse “crown thy good with brotherhood” (2), inviting the reader to determine whether the United States has lived up to its ideal of universal “brotherhood.” Her opening paragraph references the US motto, “Out of many, one,” to lay the groundwork for her discussion of Multiculturalism in the United States, which examines the nature of that “one.”

Read through the lens of the present, it could also be said that the essay employs historical allusion, as there is no explicit mention of the events of 9/11 until the last paragraph. Instead, Quindlen references the attack through phrases like “this moment [of] enormous tragedy” (2), or “at times like this” (8).