Birdsong

As is typical of literary realism, the story is set in an ordinary world, among the rhythms of everyday life. The narrative has a confessional tone as the narrator relays the concerns of both her life and the lives of others. Although framing, flashbacks, and exposition are the story’s most prominent literary devices, Adichie uses dialogue to establish the characters in the story. This dialogue is highly individuated from one character to another and helps to create verisimilitude, which is a key ingredient in literary realism. Verisimilitude is a fictional text’s ability to create the illusion of reality—often through close observation of the seemingly mundane or trivial details that make up the texture of life in the real world. Many aspects of this story serve to generate verisimilitude, from the carefully rendered speech patterns of the characters to the detailed descriptions of traffic on the streets of Lagos. Given the reality of gender norms in modern society, the text’s major themes of Gender as Pageantry and