CSEC English

Hello there—especially all of you preparing to go into 4th or 5th form in September. Next year’s exams seem a long way off, but the sooner you start learning what you need to know, the better prepared you will be. We want to help you. Follow our weekly lessons here in the Sunday Stabroek, and you’ll get lots of tips to help you improve your English skills. Read on now, and enjoy your CSEC English page!

LITERARY DEVICES

Writers have their tools just as carpenters, tailors and architects have theirs. The tools that writers have are sometimes called ‘devices’ or ‘techniques’. So you will come across the terms ‘poetic devices’, ‘dramatic techniques’, ‘literary devices’, and ‘narrative strategies’. All of those terms refer to the skills of the writer/craftsman.

We’ve looked at many of the techniques that the dramatist can use to make his play effective: costumes, props, scenery, lighting and sound effects, grouping and movements of the actors, and so on.

We’ve looked at many of the techniques/devices that the poet can use: rhyme, rhythm, sound effects like onomatopoeia, alliteration and assonance, imagery (simile, metaphor, personification and allusion), repetition, and so on.

Today, let’s think about the tools/devices/techniques that are available to the novelist/short story writer: narrative strategies.

Here are a few devices that the prose writer can use: ● Point of view ● Setting/landscape ● Repeated/contrasting structures ● Contrasting characters ● Withholding information from the reader ● Stylistic features like irony, creole-speaking characters, switching from

everyday to poetic language, etc.

Point of view Some of your stories are told from the point of view of a child narrator. This can be very effective because the reader may become more sympathetic in response to the child’s inability to understand what is going on (as in Emma). In To Da-Duh, because of the child’s point of view, we see the granddaughter boasting about having won the battle with her grandmother, but we are able, too, to see how distressed DaDuh is, so we realize that the girl has a lot of growing up to do: we are critical of her.

Setting/landscape Sometimes the setting or landscape is almost a character in the story. In The Man of the House, for instance, descriptions of the landscape and the places Flurry goes to tell us about his playful, imaginative games, his terror of the men who tease him in the pub, his religious up-bringing (and the hope and guilt it puts in him), and the general hostility and unconcern of people like the dispenser, when Flurry himself is so afraid that his mother may be dying. The landscape is used to reveal Flurry’s childlike nature, the hostility of society, and the hopes and fears of this little boy.

Repeated/contrasting structures or landscapes Charles Dickens wrote many novels in the late 19th century, exposing some of England’s social problems. He was very concerned about family life. One technique he uses is to portray several different households in a novel—all different. Out of the half dozen families, the reader will find just ONE that has all the features of an ideal family. By using repeated and contrasting structures (in this case, families), Dickens manages to tell us what the ideal family should be like, without actually preaching at us. Similarly, Edwidge Danticat introduces several damaged women, comparing and contrasting how they manage to deal with their pain. She also contrasts the landscapes of Haiti and New York so that we can identify what is good and what is bad about each.

Contrasting characters Blood Brothers is a nice example of this technique since the two boys are so different. What do we learn by comparing them? In Georgia and Them There United States, we are invited to compare the narrator (and her attitude and values) with her aunt and cousin who have migrated. Did you end up criticizing the falsity and emptiness of her family members who had left the Caribbean and embraced American ways?

Withholding information from the reader One type of novel that depends on withholding information is the detective novel. You never find out ‘who dunnit’ until you get to the very end, do you? It would be a hopeless detective novel if you knew from page one who had committed the crime. So many writers maintain suspense by delaying tactics. Think about The Boy Who Loved Ice Cream. Look how long we have to wait to find out whether or not Benjy will get that longed-for ice cream! In To Kill a Mockingbird, think about how long we wait until we learn the full story about Boo Radley. Think of how much suspense that delay has created!

Stylistic features like irony, creole-speaking characters, switching from everyday to poetic language, etc.

The writer adds to the reality of the characters by having them speak in Creole. In The Two Grandmothers, Olive Senior cleverly uses language to show how the child narrator is growing up and changing her attitude to each of the grandmothers. She writes like a child at first, with run-on sentences, simple vocabulary and poor punctuation. In later letters she is far more sophisticated. She refers to Grandma Elaine’s sometimes vulgar use of language, and criticizes the villagers around Grandma Del for not speaking ‘properly’. She observes that Grandma Del’s language is influenced by church and the Bible, but not Grandma Elaine’s. Both the narrator’s own use of language and her awareness of the language of others serves to inform the reader of her changing attitude to things Caribbean.