Introduction
The passage under analysis is a peace of emotive prose which is mostly the author's narrative containing 2 short dialogs rendered in direct speech.
Information about the author (optional) - необязательно
This text is an extract from Fitzgerald's short story 'The Ice Palace'. Frances Scott Fitzgerald is one of the most famous American novelists of the 1st part of the 20th century was born in 1896 and died in 1940.
His literary work include: 'This side of paradise' (1920) - «По эту сторону рая», 'The Grate Gatsby' (1925) «Великий Гэтсби» which is considered to be his finest novels, 'Tender is the night' (1944) «Ночь нежна», 'The last Tycoon' «Последний магнат». It remains unfinished. He also wrote the number of short stories. The most famous one is 'Tales of the Jazz Age'. He was famous for his tremendous realism and considered to be one of the greatest masters of emotive prose among his contemporaries.
Summary (компрессия текста: 5-7 предложений)
The text under analysis contains a description of a friendly chat between a girl, Sally Carrol, and a guy named Clark, Georgia Tech graduated, who seems to be her boyfriend. Clark picks her up in a car and intends to take her out swimming. He looks and behaves like a good natured easy going guy with a steady income and no big problems. He is also a success with girls, Sally Carrol being one of them.
Analysis of the text
Linguistic analysis of the text
Speaking of the language used by the author what amazed me most is Fitzgerald's peculiar use of verbs which he mostly puts in the figurative meanings in a memo so you nick that it makes his writing definitely different from any other 2(fh century writer.
E.g.: 'dozing round the lazy streets' instead of 'lazily hanging around the streets'.
It sometimes takes your time to guess why he picks up this very verb out of a language line of synonyms. Thus he says:
E.g.: 'Sally Carrol gazed down' instead of 'looked down',
'to regard the car' instead of 'look at the car', 'watch the car',
'the whistle split the dusty air' instead of 'sounded',
'Clark twisted his tall body round' instead of 'turned out',
'he bent a distorted glance' instead of 'cast a glance',
'destroying parts of green apple' instead of'eating',
'she kicked over' instead of 'turned over'.
One can hardly think of anything linguistically better than saying that 'girls enjoyed being swum with and danced with and made love to' to mean that those girls just liked it when boys swam with them, danced with them and made love to them.
Stylistic analysis of the text
Fitzgerald being a great master of description employs a great number of stylistic devices.
1. Fitzgerald's artistic sense prompts him the use of a number of metaphors that make his writing more expressive and convey his special feelings to the reader. Among those metaphors that can be found in the given passage I would name such as expressions:
'the whistle split the dusty air' in the meaning that the car (horn) sounded (the car horned),
'she raised herself with profound inertia' to mean that she rose reluctantly,
'she had been occupied in alternately destroying parts of a green apple and painting paper dolls for her younger sister' which are regarded as a sustained metaphor.
To make his characteristics more expressive as well as to attach to them decisional shades of meaning Fitzgerald uses numerous epithets that make his subjective evaluations more imaginative.
I would name the following epithets:
'brilliant and perfunctorily way of seating' meaning the same as 'graceful and casual',
'voluminous sigh' instead of deep sigh',
'noisy niggery street fairs' meaning street fairs with noisy afro-americans,
'soft-voiced girls' which I regard as a compound epithet meaning girls speaking in pleasant voices.
The detached construction
'just enough to keep himself in ease and his car in gasoline' also called my attention. Due to the peculiar use of the preposition 'in' referring to both the state f his mind and the state of his car which constitutes a rather original play of words called zeugma.