The Prose In Flannery O Connor's The American Scholar
The prose taken from The American Scholar is a descriptive prose, literally explaining both the physical appearance of the biggest heart in the world and the function of a heart, while upon further analysis, the readers can find more connotations to those lines that all living creatures have one thing in common: a heart that is able to experience emotions of a kind- love. The author achieves those effects through a wide range of techniques from the use of metaphor, sentence structure, and language.
The author first humanizes the descriptive account of a whale to make further connection to humans. In the second and third lines of the prose, both similes and house metaphor are present: “as big as a room” and “as big as swinging doors in a …show more content…
The last paragraph at the same time also represents the prose as a whole: the life lesson, exploration, and emotion of love. The readers learn that one cannot trust anyone and can only trust oneself, as supported by the sentence “we are utterly open with no one”. Furthermore, the listing of “not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend” emphasizes that not even the closest person can be trusted, and that one can only trust one’s heart. Another life lesson is shown in “when young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always”, meaning that when ones are all young, ones always believe in true love and the live-happily-ever-after stereotype, but in the end ones come to a realization that hearts can easily break in reality, and that true love may just be a fantasy. House metaphor is also presented by the “brick up” in the “you can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant”, and illustrating that even the strongest hearts can break, which is further justified by the run-on sentence using the repeated “and”s. The author then visualized some examples of emotion of love in the end to stimulate, engage, and communicate with the readers that the heart, a well-accepted common metaphor for emotion, reminds the readers of its
The author first humanizes the descriptive account of a whale to make further connection to humans. In the second and third lines of the prose, both similes and house metaphor are present: “as big as a room” and “as big as swinging doors in a …show more content…
The last paragraph at the same time also represents the prose as a whole: the life lesson, exploration, and emotion of love. The readers learn that one cannot trust anyone and can only trust oneself, as supported by the sentence “we are utterly open with no one”. Furthermore, the listing of “not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend” emphasizes that not even the closest person can be trusted, and that one can only trust one’s heart. Another life lesson is shown in “when young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always”, meaning that when ones are all young, ones always believe in true love and the live-happily-ever-after stereotype, but in the end ones come to a realization that hearts can easily break in reality, and that true love may just be a fantasy. House metaphor is also presented by the “brick up” in the “you can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant”, and illustrating that even the strongest hearts can break, which is further justified by the run-on sentence using the repeated “and”s. The author then visualized some examples of emotion of love in the end to stimulate, engage, and communicate with the readers that the heart, a well-accepted common metaphor for emotion, reminds the readers of its