1. What is this extract about? Is it easy to retell it? Why?

1. What is this extract about? Is it easy to retell it? Why?

2. What feelings does this text evoke?

3. The absence of punctuation marks for the direct speech is purposeful. Try to restore them and see the difference. What type of narrative is thus created?

4. Why is this shift from the 1^st person to 3^rd person narration?

5. Would it make any difference if we skip the ‘I feel’ phrase in the first line?

6. Where do we come to know the main character’s name? Why not at once?

7. What helps the reader see the difference between the concrete man in the story and the generalized MAN, as he is viewed by the narrator?

8. The rhythm of the narrative is far from even. Due to what? Why?

9. What are the prevailing connotations in this extract?

10. Account for the role of the allusion (‘Swing low…) How is the allusion entwined interwoven with the theme of the text?

11. There is a vast array of female. How is it created? Can you feel the narrator’s attitude to them?

12. What is the ‘female need-to-know’ Can there be a male need-to-know? Why? What makes the phrase so obviously stigmatizing?

13. In the phrase ‘The woman beside him, his wife’ the same person is referred to twice. Why?

14. What is wrong about the word ‘professionalism’ in this context?

15. Why is she likened to ‘the person at the poolside’?

16. Jina’s facial expression is given in full detail: ‘ in her blinks and frowns and whispers’ What role does the recurrent polysyndenton play in this text?

17. And the similes?

18. When Christ appears as a reference, what does this allusion imply, if put in plain English?

19. The anaphora of SHE, the framing, the parallel constructions converge in one paragraph, full of allusions, to complete the picture – why?

20. Richard simply breathed in and out – but in what way? With a sense relief? What makes the reader visualize and hear the high he heaved? (The sniff he gave was complicated, orchestral. And when he sighed you could hear the distant seagulls falling through his lungs).

21. Why are some acts, words etc. doubled in the narration? (The woman beside him, his wife; // turned over, away from him).

22. What is the difference between an epithet and an attribute? ‘Towelly’ is as good an attribute as ‘nasty’, ‘unpleasant’, ‘bad’ – why is it preferred to them then? If one of these words were there instead of ‘towelly’ would the reader appreciate it more? The epithet (towelly smell of marriage) characterizes – sums up – the narrator’s take on the characters’ relationships.

What kind of text is this extract? Is it a narration? A dialogue? An argumentation?

What are the main features of modernist writing?

Exercises

1. Go to the USEFUL VOCABULARY section and pick any 10 lines that will fit in the analysis of this text.

2. Find the synonyms for the verbs ‘to stride’ and ‘to surge’, and explain the difference in use within each row. Draw a Mind map, if it helps.

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