Final answer:
The final scene of 'Ribbons' emphasizes the story's theme, as the characters reflect on their own lives through the reading of 'The Little Mermaid'. This literary technique serves to weave together the overarching message and lessons of the narrative.
Step-by-step explanation:
The final scene of 'Ribbons,' in which Grandmother listens to Stacy reading 'The Little Mermaid' aloud to Ian, serves mainly to emphasize the story's theme. A memoir or personal narrative often uses the resolution phase of a story to explore themes or lessons learned from the events recounted.
In this case, by reading a fairy tale about sacrifice and miscommunication, the characters implicitly reflect on their own situations and relationships, integrating the overarching message and lesson of their narrative into the text's conclusion.
The choice to include 'The Little Mermaid' within the narrative serves as an internalized setting, a literary device where an external element mirrors the internal development of characters.
Thus, the scene is not merely drawing focus on the setting, characters, or conflict explicitly, but rather it utilizes the elements of the fairy tale to subtly reinforce the larger themes of the primary story.