Advanced English skills: multi-tasking
- We are studying excerpts from texts and analysing story-telling devices: voice, setting, characterisation, tone and style, imagery, symbolism and comparisons.
- This analysis enables us to probe the layers of meaning within a text and to analyse with greater precision.
- We are learning the metalanguage to evaluate these story-telling features, which will improve our text-response essays.
- In our own personal response-style of writing, we are applying these story-telling features. (esp voice, symbolism, characterisation)
- these features in our own personal-response style of writing.
For example: Holden Caulfield’s narrative style:
Analyse Holden Caulfield’s narrative style
- Salinger uses a first person narrator, Holden Caulfield, to capture the mindset of a disaffected young adult. Holden expresses his grievances and problems to the reader, whom he addresses using the second person pronoun, as “you”. His style is confessional and personal as he lures the reader into his private world.
- Holden begins his rant in an angry and judgmental tone (quotes)
- Holden eschews the typical chronological-style narrative (the “David Copperfield” autobiographical style). Contrastingly, he intends to divulge his experiences surrounding events at “Christmas” which, he confesses, contributed to his mental stress.
