Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Blog #1: Rhetorical Strategies


· Metonymy- “We were always doing the skedaddle…” (pg 19)

· Diction depending on age at time of the story being told (shorter and simpler)

· Syntax depending on age at time of the story being told (more eloquent; compound and complex sentences)

· Didactic- “’It was like that time I threw you into the sulfur spring to teach you to swim,’ he said. ’You might have been convinced you were going to drown, but I knew you’d do just fine,’” (pg 213).

· Hyperbole- “’This family is falling apart,’”

· Fire- an allegory for life

· Allusion- Lord of the Rings

· Anecdote- The Glass Castle is created off of anecdotes of different memories in her life

· Euphemism- “the skedaddle”- In reality, it is the Dad’s innocent- sounding way of running from bankruptcy and problems.

As always, rhetorical strategies play a large role for a writer when developing a story. The Glass Castle is no exception. Jeannette Walls, although writing about her own life, finds ways to cleverly color her life through the uses of metonymies, hyperboles, and many others to brighten her writing. Walls specifically uses her diction and syntax in order to portray her story as how it was for her as a child. In the beginning of her story, she uses shorter syntax and childish words that help to guide the reader through her life’s timeline. When a child, her short sentences will consist of few words such as, “I screamed,” “Juju was barking,” and, “mom ran into the room,” (pg 9). These portray her simple thinking as a child while using words and descriptions such as, “gibberish,” “flaming ice-cream cake,” and, “gloves that came up past her elbows,” help to tell the story in how she saw it at the time (pgs 27 and 32). As Walls gets older, her language becomes more evolved as her understanding of the real world increases, and her sentences become longer and more complex, portraying her deeper understanding that her life is not as simple and perfect as a glass castle like her father tries to convince the family of.

2 comments:

  1. I noticed that too! The depth that Walls used when approaching her writing really impressed me! Things such as that add to the story so much. You are able to view the narrator not as someone who is reminiscing on childhood memories, but as the child herself, complete with the hopes, dreams, and even sentence structure :P

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  2. It just made the story all the more real and it gave it such a unique charm! The different strategies she used made you see her family exactly the way she or a child would see them and it made the horror of seeing how the parents were trapping them and bringing them down really dawn on you as it dawned on Jeannette.

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