Son

11/05/2016

Sample Title


Christina's hands get tighter and tighter around my arm. I should tell her to let go of me; it's starting to hurt. Someone kneels next to Al's face and pushes his eyelids shut. Trying to make it look like he's sleeping, maybe. Stupid. Why do people want to pretend that death is sleep? It isn't. It isn't.
Something inside me collapses. My chest is so tight, suffocating, can't breathe. I sink to the ground, dragging Christina down with me. The stone is rough under my knees. I hear something, a memory of sound. Al's sobs; his screams at night. Should have known. Still can't breathe. I press both palms to my chest and rock back and forth to free the tension in my chest. 
But that second paragraph is where the pain of Al's suicide really destroys Tris's grammar and her sense of the world. "My chest is so tight, suffocating, can't breathe" isn't grammatically correct; and notice how she shifts from the important stuff around her (Al is dead) to sensations that aren't so important, like noticing that the stone is rough. People under pressure notice the weirdest things. 


That is, most of Tris's sentences are super straightforward and pretty easy to read: "Will doesn't argue with me" (19.47); "Oh, I think" (25.101); "Slowly I nod" (31.84); etc. We could pull out many more quotes, but you can see from these examples how Tris usually narrates in a straightforward way, telling us what happens without too much flash and flair.

But let's also acknowledge that Tris says the word "maybe" a lot, especially when she's discussing her feelings and thoughts: "Maybe I do mean it" (10.78); "Maybe the answer is neither. Maybe I am wired like the Divergent" (24.88); etc. So Tris might be straightforward in general, but she doesn't seem so certain about her feelings, which really comes out in her style of offering these possibilities.

Brak komentarzy:

Prześlij komentarz