Oxymoron: “[S]harp sweetness” (page 12).
Simile: “The cheetah licked my palm, his tongue warm and rough, like sandpaper dipped in hot water” (page 109).
Personification: “[T]he flames leaped up, reaching my face” (page 9).
Allusion: “‘No one else owns them. You just have to claim it before anyone else does, like that dago fellow Columbus claimed America for Queen Isabella’” (page 40).
Hyperbole: “The class laughed violently” (page 138).
Understatement: “‘It’s good we raised you young ‘uns to be tough,’ Dad said” (page 150).
Situational Irony: “‘But you can take my word for it that Jeannette and Brian are exceptionally bright, even gifted.’ She smiled at him...The principal decided that Brian and I were both a bit slow and had speech impediments and that made it difficult for others to understand us. He placed us both in special classes for students with learning disabilities” (page 136-137).
The job of an author is to write the story they know, the story that begs to be written. So when the writer sits down and brings these words up front, they enlist methods that help them get their points across. While it is debatable as to whether or not the writer includes these rhetorical strategies deliberately, no story out there has yet to exclude their presence from its pages. In Jeannette Walls’ memoir, The Glass Castle, she engages such strategies as similes, hyperboles, and oxymorons. Throughout the length of the novel, the reader waits for that one sentence that exclaims that the whole tale was merely made up, because no one can imagine a family actually living the way the Walls' did. However, they never receive it. Instead the story is delivered as somewhat paradoxical. Her childhood has memories that contradict each other, while at the same time making complete sense. For instance, Jeannette writes about her father in a way that makes the reader unsure about how they feel about him. At times, he proves to be a wonderful--though sometimes quite eccentric--dad to his kids. Yet, in the same breath, he will reach around his family towards his liquor bottle, leaving them behind. Contradictory feelings swirl about her story, which is reflected in the structure of the novel, itself, in its use of these writing strategies.
In Jeanette Wall's memoir it is hard to define rhetorical strategy after rhetorical strategy. Like you were pointing out, as readers we wait for that "flowery" diction or inspirational figurative language that may turn a memoir into a beautifully written piece of fiction, however, Jeanette leaves these details out almost to convey that sense of reality. Her lack of figurative language and flowery diction almost symbolize the life she led; it was somber and adventurous, but never beautiful. So instead, Jeanette employs irony and paradox in her memoir to parallel that sense of bitter sweet truth.
ReplyDeleteOn the surface, Jeannette Walls does a wonderful job recounting her memories with the same emotions that she possessed when she was a child. However, after analyzing the novel, I found that Jeanette Walls uses rhetorical strategies to secretly communicate her current emotions that she possess toward her past. For example, she commonly uses situational irony to point out to the reader what her innocence prevented her from seeing years ago. The rhetorical strategies become essential in novel since it is the way that Jeannette Walls communicates to her readers.
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