A Picture of Conflict
A Picture of Conflict Conflict is the driving force of a narrative. It shows and structures the flow of events. In James Alexander Thom’s essay, “The Perfect Pictures” he is torn between two thoughts ‘to take the picture’ or ‘to not take the picture’. He is sharing a personal experience about how the media has made “human sufferings ... a spectator sport” (Thom 460). Thom has an opportunity to take “the perfect picture” that would have gained him a prize winning photograph, but he decides not to because he chooses to make the right decision by giving the family their rightful space to heal. He narrates a tragic scene where he as a young reporter witnesses an emotional event in which a grandfather accidentally runs over his baby granddaughter with his pickup truck. The purpose of Thom’s narration is to make his audience empathize with him. This analysis discusses the various writing techniques Thom uses to make his essay a successful and effective essay. Narrative essays recreate the events that have occurred and are told from a specific point of view in the first person or third person. Thom uses a first person narrative by the use of the pronoun ‘I’ in the opening paragraph by stating: “I was a young police reporter, driving to a scene I didn’t want to see” (Thom 459). Writing in the first person allows Thom to add more personal details which gives life to the story and convinces the reader of his message. Another aspect of a narrative is the effective use of verbs and nouns. The nouns make the reader ‘see’ and the verbs which are vivid and precise make the reader ‘feel’. Thom’s expressions such as “backlight by a frilly curtained window”, “swaddled corpse”, “tiny body” (Thom 460), makes the reader picture the scene and has a deep emotional impact on the event. A narrative becomes even more powerful when it has a dialogue stating a real conversation in the narrators own words. It heightens the interest and drives the reader in to
Cited: Thom, James Alexander. “The Prefect Picture.” Strategies for Successful Writing Ninth Edition. (2011):459-460.