From Man and Boy by Tony Parson

1. Read the extract bellow and say what it is about. What stylistic device is used to introduce the theme in the opening sentence?

2. Speak about the narrative method and techniques used in the extract. How do they characterize the narrator?

3. What method of characterization does the author use to portray the man?

4. What is the character’s attitude to his thirtieth birthday at the beginning of the extract?

5. Is the mood set in the extract optimistic or pessimistic? Find evidence from the extract to prove your opinion.

6. Prove that the man can’t choose how to celebrate this birthday. What images arise in his mind? How do they contribute to your impression about him?

7. Analyse the last two paragraphs of the extract and say why the man can’t choose a definite way of celebration. (What does he think of becoming thirty?) What stylistic devices serve the purpose?

8. Sum up everything and say what idea runs through the extract.

Thirty should be when you think – these are my golden years, these are my salad days, the best is yet to come – all that old crap.

You are still young enough to stay up all night, but you are old enough to have a credit card. All the uncertainties and poverty of your teens and twenties are finally over – and good riddance to the lot of them – but the sap is still rising.

Thirty should be a good birthday. One of the best.

But how to celebrate reaching the big three-oh? With a collection of laughing single friends in some intimate bar or restaurant? Or surrounded by a loving wife and adoring small children in the bosom of the family home?

There has to be a good way of turning thirty. Perhaps they are all good ways.

All my images of this particular birthday seemed to be derived from some glossy American sitcom. When I thought of turning thirty, I thought of attractive thirty-nothing marrieds snogging like teens in heat while in the background a gurgling baby crawls across some polished parquet floor, or I saw a circle of good-looking, wisecracking friends drinking latte and showing off their impressive knitwear while wryly bemoaning the dating game. That was my problem. When I thought of turning thirty, I thought of somebody else’s life.

That’s what thirty should be – grown-up without being disappointed, settled without being complacent, worldly wise, but not so worldly wise that you feel like chucking yourself under the train. Time of your life.

By thirty you have finally realised that you are not going to live forever, of course. But surely that should only make the laughing latte-drinking present taste even sweeter? You shouldn’t let your inevitable death put damper on things. Don’t let the long, slow slide to the grave get in the way of a good time.

From Cold Fire by Dean Koontz

1. Read the extract below and say what it is about outline the situation described.

2. Which narrative techniques are used in the extract? How do they render its atmosphere and the character’s state.?

3. Divide the extract into logical parts and say what they touch upon.

4. Analyse the first paragraph. How does the rhyme “Snuggle down in my cocoon, be a butterfly soon” hint at the changes the character has undergone. What device does the author resort to for the purpose?

5. What changes are these? What expressive means and stylistic devices are used to reveal them? What events brought these changes about?

6. What kind of emotions were fighting in her mind when she saw the CNN reporter at the airport? What tropes and figures of speech help to express them?

7. What conclusion did the woman come to? How did she feel about it?

8. Analyze the paragraph, which begins with “She was free…” What was she free from? Was it good riddance? Give your reasons, providing illustrations from the text.

9. What is her attitude to journalism and her place in it?

10. Look through the last paragraph. How does it explain the woman’s career choice? What stylistic devices does the author use to portray her childhood and adolescence? How does the paragraph account for her present free-spiritedness?

11. Why did she laugh like a kid?

12. Formulate the message of the extract and comment upon it.

Earlier in the night, tongue lubricated by beer, she had spoken a truth as she had slipped off the precipice of sleep: “Snuggle down in my cocoon, be a butterfly soon.” Now she knew what she had meant, and she understood the changes that she had been going through, changes that she had only begun to realize were under way when she had been in the VIP lounge at the airport after the crash.

She was never going back to the Portland Press.

She was never going to work on a newspaper again.

She was finished as a reporter.

That was why she had overreacted to Anlock, the CNN reporter at the airport. Loathing him, she was nevertheless eaten by guilt on a subconscious level because he was chasing a major story that she was ignoring even though she had been a part of it. If she was a reporter, she should have been interviewing her fellow survivors and rushing to write it up for the Press. No such desire touched her, however, not even for a fleeting moment, so she took the raw cloth of her subconscious self-disgust and tailored a suit of rage with enormous shoulders and wide, wide lapels; then she dressed herself in it and strutted and seethed for the CNN camera, all in frantic attempt to deny that she was going to walk away from the career and a commitment that she had once thought would last all her life.

Now she got out of bed and paced, too excited to sit still.

She was finished as a reporter.

Finished.

She was free. As a working-class kid from a powerless family, she had been obsessed by a lifelong need to feel important, included, a real insider. As a bright child who grew into a brighter woman she had been puzzled by the apparent disorderliness of life, and she had been compelled to explain it as best she could with the inadequate tools of journalism. Ironically, the duel quest for acceptance and explanations – which had driven her to work and study seventy- and eighty-hour weeks for as long as she could remember – had left her rootless, with no significant lover, no children, no real friends, and no more answers to the difficult question of life than those with which she had started. Now she was suddenly free of those needs and obsessions, no longer concerned about belonging to any elite club or explaining human behaviour.

She had thought she hated journalism. She didn’t. What she hated was her failure at it; and she had failed because journalism had never been the right thing for her.

To understand herself and break the bonds of habit, all she had needed was to survive a devastating airline tragedy. […]

She laughed. She sat in one of the two armchairs, drew her legs up under her, and laughed as she had not laughed since she had been a giddy teenager.

No, that was where the problem began: she had never been giddy. She had been a serious minded teenager, already hooked on current events, worried about World War III because they told her she was likely to die in a nuclear holocaust before she graduated from high school; worried about overpopulation because they told her that famine would claim one and a half billion lives by 1990, cutting the world population in half, decimating even the United States; worried because man-made pollution was causing the planet to cool down drastically, insuring another ice age that would destroy civilization within her own lifetime!!!, which was front-page news in the late seventies, before the Greenhouse Effect and worries about planetary warming. She had spent her adolescence and early adulthood worrying too much and enjoying too little. Without joy, she had lost perspective and had allowed every news sensation – some based on genuine problems, some entirely fraudulent – to consume her.

Now she laughed like a kid.