In "Where The World Began", Margaret Laurence describes her exuberant childhood memories of her small prairie hometown. However, she does not merely give descriptions of her childhood nor the prairies; she uses her prairie hometown as an example in order to represent Canada, to express the extraordinary affection she has towards Canada. In reading the essay, I found a conflict that Laurence attempts to resolve. Throughout the vivid details of her prairie hometown, she informs us about the beautiful, lively landscape, the energetic activities she enjoyed throughout the changing seasons, and the stories of the oddities that made the town active and alive. Within these descriptions, she constantly poses a question - how can a town this alive be considered dull? How can Canada this alive be considered dull? For me, the conflict ends in Laurence's strong belief that how we perceive the world is shaped by our childhood environment.
             In the opening paragraph, Laurence puts us into an imagination of the most dynamic and vibrant place on earth, mentioning in the beginning that it was the place where the world began and confessing that she was talking about a small prairie town at the end. The exaggeration she uses here makes a powerful impact on the theme by informing us about Laurence's strong personal perception of the place. And she writes about the standard view of life on the prairies, using vocabulary like dull, bleak, flat, and uninteresting. But when she uses modality such as "The town could be called bizarre" or "the land in which it grew could be called harsh", she poses her uncertain attitude towards this standard view and clearly states the opposite idea by using the adverb 'never': "But never merely flat or uninteresting. Never dull."
             Laurence's flashback to her childhood episodes begins with a first person plural pronoun 'we', in an invit...