EXTRACT ANALYSIS
Extract 1: from The Girl who Loved Tom Gordon
by Stephen King
The extract under analysis is taken from the book “The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon” by Stephen King. The extract is about a young girl who is lost in the woods. It is the third-person descriptive exposition.
Extract 1: from The Girl who Loved Tom Gordon
by Stephen King
The extract under analysis is taken from the book “The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon” by Stephen King. The extract is about a young girl who is lost in the woods. It is the third-person descriptive exposition.
The extract can be divided into three logical parts:
The first part is the opening sentence of the extract, which is also the topic sentence that introduces the idea of the whole extract. This sentence immediately imposes the feeling of menace. To show it the author resorts to a prolonged metaphor “the world had teeth and it could bite you with them” where the central image is “teeth” while “could bite” and “any time it wanted” are the contributory images. This metaphor sets the reader thinking/conveys the idea that we can be hurt when you least expect it.
The impression of the first part is not sustained in the next one. The mood of the second part is set in contrast to the reader’s expectation of danger. This part creates the atmosphere of serenity: It’s 10 o’clock in early June. A young girl is sitting in her mother’s car and playing with her doll. The author seems to deliberately divert the reader’s attention from the danger that we expect to come.
From this part we learn a number of details about the time and the place of the events, as well as about the character of the extract.
It’s a girl who is quite safe, because she’s sitting in her mother’s car. We can guess that she is approximately under the age of ten because she’s in the back seat (i.e. she’s not adult enough to occupy the front seat yet). Besides, she is playing with her doll. The author mentions the doll’s name first and only after that by way of detachment: “playing with Mona, her doll” he helps us to realize that it’s a toy. The priority of the name mentioning is another proof of the girl’s young age, for it is typical of little children to treat their toys as a human being. We see that the girl loves her doll and maybe treats it as her close friend.
Then the author describes her interests through the way she was dressed. We understand that the girl is fond of sports, baseball in particular, because she’s wearing her “batting practice jersey” (it is shown through metonymy “Red Sox”); while with the help of insertion “(the one with 36 GORDON on the back)” the reader can understand that she’s a fan of the famous Red Sox’s pitcher Tom Gordon.
We also learn about the girl’s family background. With the help of metonymy “Dodge Caravan” that describes her mother’s car, the reader may suggest that child comes from a well-to-do family.
After learning all these details the reader’s attention is almost completely distracted from the idea of impending threat conveyed in the topic sentence. However, this idea and its mood again spring to the mind in the third part of the extract. Now the situation has drastically changed: the girl is alone, lost in the woods.
By way of parallel construction “At ten o’clock … by eleven o’clock” the author shows how quickly everything has changed for the girl, who within an hour has found herself quite helpless in unfamiliar surroundings. Her inner state of anxiety is depicted through anaphora “trying not to be terrified, trying not to let herself think…” It reveals the girl’s fear as she can’t help thinking of the coming danger. The author also resorts to a graphical device (italics) to present her inner speech “This is serious, this is really serious”. The last fragment of the anaphora “Trying not to think that sometimes when people get lost in the woods they get seriously hurt” is a separate sentence. The author uses segmentation to enhance the impression of threat and the girl’s fear: “Sometimes they die”, which shows that the girl might die any moment, that she realizes it and has become very frightened.
The author resorts to suspense, because even at the end of the extract the reader is kept in the dark as to what exactly will happen to the girl later. But we might suggest that she is in deadly danger indeed.
The first part is the opening sentence of the extract, which is also the topic sentence that introduces the idea of the whole extract. This sentence immediately imposes the feeling of menace. To show it the author resorts to a prolonged metaphor “the world had teeth and it could bite you with them” where the central image is “teeth” while “could bite” and “any time it wanted” are the contributory images. This metaphor sets the reader thinking/conveys the idea that we can be hurt when you least expect it.
The impression of the first part is not sustained in the next one. The mood of the second part is set in contrast to the reader’s expectation of danger. This part creates the atmosphere of serenity: It’s 10 o’clock in early June. A young girl is sitting in her mother’s car and playing with her doll. The author seems to deliberately divert the reader’s attention from the danger that we expect to come.
From this part we learn a number of details about the time and the place of the events, as well as about the character of the extract.
It’s a girl who is quite safe, because she’s sitting in her mother’s car. We can guess that she is approximately under the age of ten because she’s in the back seat (i.e. she’s not adult enough to occupy the front seat yet). Besides, she is playing with her doll. The author mentions the doll’s name first and only after that by way of detachment: “playing with Mona, her doll” he helps us to realize that it’s a toy. The priority of the name mentioning is another proof of the girl’s young age, for it is typical of little children to treat their toys as a human being. We see that the girl loves her doll and maybe treats it as her close friend.
Then the author describes her interests through the way she was dressed. We understand that the girl is fond of sports, baseball in particular, because she’s wearing her “batting practice jersey” (it is shown through metonymy “Red Sox”); while with the help of insertion “(the one with 36 GORDON on the back)” the reader can understand that she’s a fan of the famous Red Sox’s pitcher Tom Gordon.
We also learn about the girl’s family background. With the help of metonymy “Dodge Caravan” that describes her mother’s car, the reader may suggest that child comes from a well-to-do family.
After learning all these details the reader’s attention is almost completely distracted from the idea of impending threat conveyed in the topic sentence. However, this idea and its mood again spring to the mind in the third part of the extract. Now the situation has drastically changed: the girl is alone, lost in the woods.
By way of parallel construction “At ten o’clock … by eleven o’clock” the author shows how quickly everything has changed for the girl, who within an hour has found herself quite helpless in unfamiliar surroundings. Her inner state of anxiety is depicted through anaphora “trying not to be terrified, trying not to let herself think…” It reveals the girl’s fear as she can’t help thinking of the coming danger. The author also resorts to a graphical device (italics) to present her inner speech “This is serious, this is really serious”. The last fragment of the anaphora “Trying not to think that sometimes when people get lost in the woods they get seriously hurt” is a separate sentence. The author uses segmentation to enhance the impression of threat and the girl’s fear: “Sometimes they die”, which shows that the girl might die any moment, that she realizes it and has become very frightened.
The author resorts to suspense, because even at the end of the extract the reader is kept in the dark as to what exactly will happen to the girl later. But we might suggest that she is in deadly danger indeed.
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