English Essay Analysis

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From the protagonist’s inside point of view, the extract shows his thinking about death. Following the protagonist’s train of thinking, it’s easy to find the absurdity in his thoughts and comparisons between himself and Genghis Khan and Suleiman. Although absurd and ridiculous, the protagonist expresses these things in an earnest tone, as if he is thinking about those questions carefully.

When it comes to tones, the extract uses diverse tones, colloquial and philosophical, objective and calm and so on. But the total tone is pathetic. The protagonist feels panic about the unavoidable death.

At the beginning are four cases of death. The real writer makes every case a separate paragraph, obviously emphasizing those cases, which suggests that what the protagonist is simply “death” over these seemly irrelevant four cases. What’s more, keeping notice of different death events in different places reveals the protagonist’s focus on death.

Apart from that, the extract combines long sentences and short sentences, making the text richer and more readable. There are also many Participial phrase, independent subjective structure and elliptical sentence structure. Those structures make the narration concise and casual, thus more life-like.

Practice 3

The extract takes the form of first-person narration, as the narrator here is a participating character in the story. Hence the narration is of internal point of view. The novel, as a first-person narrative, mostly represents a combined “mind style” of both protagonist and narrator so as to enhance the verisimilitude of linguistic expressions of “individual mind self.”

On textual level, the extract uses analepsis for the whole passage but inserts present tense somewhere such as “Now, when I travel, I often think of him and bypass the rental car for the metro” to express the narrator’s miss for father.

On syntactical level, most sentences in the extract are complete and regular, sign of realism. There are plenty of scenic narrative, psycho-narrative, profile narrative and conversation narrative and so on. Those detailed and vivid narrative make the story more believable and improve the readability of the story. What’s more, diverse detailed narrative enrich largely the image of the characters.

On rhetorical level, the extract has used many rhetorical techniques. For instance, “would have thought she was a statue” uses metaphor and “her head crowned by a fabulous headdress like an organdy butterfly” uses simile. Besides, “its walls looked impenetrable to sea storm and invasion” uses hyperbole. So many application of rhetorical techniques add to the readability of the extract.

On lexical level, “went”, “took”, “rode”, etc. the use of monosyllable words, meaning the characters’ actions are quick and the plots progress soon. Apart from that, “would”, “will”, “seem”, “could”, etc. the use of modal verb shows the character’s mental traits and then form the character’s mental style through dealing direct or indirect inner narrative.

The extract makes outside and inner narrative mixed.

The extract uses polyphonic narrative. At the last of the passage, “my psychology”, “my conversation with father” and father’s action form three floors.