Choose one of the following to answer. Please post your response by noon, Sat., Feb. 27.
1) Describe the relationship between the straight and parenthetical passages in Martha Gellhorn's "The Third Winter." In other words, what is the function of each and how do they function in relation to each other?
2) Analyze an instance of Gellhorn's use of metaphor or simile. Include why she choose this image and whether or not it works and how or why.
16 comments:
Throughout the piece there is a constant comparison of the sickly children to dolls or toys. "There was another child, like an old-faced doll against the pillows, who turned away her head." This image works so well here because the reader can see this child propped up against the pillows turning her head as the clancking dinner wagon passes. It is a hopeless image, reflective of how Gellhorn feels about Barcelona thoughout the story.
"The children looked like toys until you came closer--tiny white figures propped up with pillows, swathed in bandages, the little pale faces showing, the great back eyes staring at you, the small hands playing over the sheets." To compare children to toys or dolls is to focus on their lifelessness. They are weak and have to be propped up like a doll. They are small and malnourished, which makes their eyes look even bigger, just like a doll. When Gellhorn used the verb playing, she brings the reader back to the reality that these are children who are suffering, not toys.
One simile that really stuck out to me was when she said, "They know perfectly, by the sound of the first explosion, where the bombs are falling. If the first bomb sounds hollow and muffled, they do not move from their places, because they know there is no immediate danger. If they can hear the drone of the planes to clearly or the first explosion is jagged and harsh, they scatter for doorways or refuges. They do this professionally, like soldiers." She chose this because it almost perfectly describes what it was like to be living in Spain during the war. People were so used to it, it was almost as if they were soldiers themselves. They knew all the signs so well it was second nature. It was instinctual. It was just as ingrained in the civilians as well as the soldiers what to do when the bombs started falling. Aside from the simile being a great visual, the description itself of the people reacting to the world around them really enables the reader to picture it. She didn't only describe their actions, but how they looked...skinny. You could picture the people and picture their reactions so you get a near perfect sense of what she was experiencing.
I found it interesting how some of the passages of Gellhorn's were parenthesized. At first, it confused me. But then I realized that the "The Third Winter" was really about her stay with the Spanish family. The parenthetical passages are simply breakouts from the family that give more detail about Spain's troubles on a larger scale.
I liked how this allowed her to zoom in and out from the family to Barcelona. The straight and paranthetical passages complement each other by giving the details of a larger picture and then allowing Gellhorn to personalize the issues she brings up by relating them to the family.
Although this is a common technique in journalism, I have never seen it done so blatantly witht the use of parenthesis.
In Martha Gellhorn's "The Third Winter," the author displays a rather idiosyncratic writing style, weaving together elements of harrowing wartime through both straight and parenthetical passages.
The straight passages have a more personal and also rather "one moment in time" feel to them. They focus upon the Hernandez family who, like countless other Spaniards at the time, struggled against the wartime hardships at hand.
In the parenthetical passages, Gellhorn tackles her material with a broader lense. We come to learn about the larger communities of the time, and of how war has come to influence not only the individual but also society as a whole.
Gellhorn's style is effective in its' ability to cover several important bases, with its' zooming into the adversities faced by one particular family, followed by a zooming out onto the similarly-afflicted, broader community at hand.
The straight passages provide the structure for the story’s narrative. In these passages we follow Gellhorn to the Hernandez’s house. We are a part of the visit and the conversations taking place through the narrative she writes.
The parenthetical passages allow Gellhorn to provide scenes and vignettes of life in Spain during the war. The parenthetical passages almost function like a more organized stream of consciousness, or a sidebar to the story. She writes them as if something from the straight-forward narrative triggers a memory or a thought that she unfolds in the parenthetical passage. For example, in the first transition, where the young boy, Miguel, says he enjoys watching the people fight on the food line. She brings the straight forward narrative to a close, and begins a parenthetical passage describing what it’s really like on a food line in Spain (on the occasions that there is enough food for them to open).
After the parenthetical passage, she returns to the straight narrative passages describing the scenes and conversations at the Hernandez home. In class, we’ve been talking about moving from a wide angle view to a more narrow focus, but this story does the opposite in an interesting way. It takes a specific instance with a specific family in the traditional narrative, and the parenthetical passages allow her to put the meaning of the war for Spain’s larger population into context for the reader. These passages offer specific details about the soldiers, the famine and the injured children, and the straight narrative passages is the glue that holds the story together, taking us to the Hernandez home and ending the narrative when Gellhorn leaves the house.
As Andrew said before me, I think that the straight passages of the story are a moment in time spent with the Hernandez family. They are specific conversations that are what make up the important parts of the tale. Not one of the straight passages is left without pieces of dialogue, and dialogue is a very important tool in telling a story. I like how those are broken up by the groupings of parentheses.
The parenthetical passages provide background information. It broadens Gellhorn's account of what was going on with the Spaniards in between her paragraphs of dialogue with the Hernandez family. I didn't catch any dialogue in the parenthetical passages because it was strictly hard information. I love the use of parenthesis because I, too, treat it like a pause in the story--a chance to hit pause and explain. That's what she was doing, as it seemed to me. They function in relation to each other because the parenthetical parts snowball off of what was just revealed in the straight pieces of dialogue. It works because it almost tells two stories.
It is interesting that in Gellhorn’s piece, the portions of the story that describe the wartime conditions in Spain more directly are huge chunks of texts placed in parentheses. Aren’t parentheses usually an indication of an afterthought, an aside? Is Gellhorn placing less value on these descriptions of amputated children, of starving women fighting for food, of soldiers three winters into war? No. But, she chooses to allow her encounter with the Hernandez family to stand free of this sort of punctuation, structural signifying that this is the crux of her story. However, description of the interaction would not carry the same weight without the long asides, if you could all them that. I actually went back and read the story while skipping the parenthetical passages…and it was far from striking. With the exceptions of the mention of the starving baby and the son at war, there is little mention or description of the depth of suffering and pain caused by the war for those like the Hernandez family. By pushing the descriptions of, for instance, the injured children, out of the “straight” narrative, readers are given context for the situation. This generally makes what is discussed seem more powerful. For example, when the young grandson says he likes when the women fight over food, readers are initially left somewhat clueless. The explanation afterward that captures their desperation through description makes the boy’s comment seem all the more sorrowful, all the more sad that the fear has become so much a part of everyday life that it can be almost commonplace or comical to those in this horrible situation. However, the choice to keep the Hernandez encounter out of the parentheses and these scold snippets of life in them is a read flag that readers should be paying attention to what this family is saying, and what that means in the context of all of this side discussion of starvation, injury, death. The fact that the story did seem mundane without the descriptions in parentheses signals that this desperation has become a part of life. Yet, the family rarely seems overly sorrowful or downtrodden in the narrative, in spite of what is going on around them. By showing us both worlds, Gellhorn suggests the family seems resilient, but that their attempt to remain hopeful and calm will reach a breaking point. Of course, nothing suggests this more than the last line of this powerful story.
Martha Gellhorn separates her stay with the Hernandez family and the more factual details of the war in Spain through straight and parenthetical passages.
The scenes in the straight passages mostly focus on the perceptions, feelings, and condition of the Hernandez family while the straight passages contain details of Spain as a whole. In her straight passages the dialogue and scenes she chooses to include pertain to the details of war- starvation, bombs, illness, and fear described in parenthesis.
By using parenthesis, Gellhorn makes it clear that she is stating the facts. I think this technique is makes it a little easier to understand the change of scene.
Everything else has pretty much been said. The way she describes her characters, like Paco, who was "beautiful and had a bad head wound" or "A jolly little girl, with pigtails and only one leg" really struck at me for her use of sincere imagery. Similes and metaphors were also greatly utilized in Gellhorn's piece.
"All of the children were the color of their pillows except the little ones with t.b., who looked quite rosy." (427)
As Suzann mentioned, Gellhorn also compares many of these wounded children to dolls or toys.
“He was a somber man, whose teeth were irregularly broken, whose fingertips were nail-less pulp; the first graduate of Gestapo torture I had known.” Within this sentence, Gellhorn is describing a German anti-fascist refugee who was night patrol in the 11th International Brigade. This contains powerful images that will make her readers cringe as their eyes pass along the words. Gellhorn uses a physical description, the fingernails, and then directly connects that to the history why this happened to him; showing her readers how she was shocked that he survived experiences most never do.
This powerful image-invoking metaphor, but I think that she might have made the metaphor a little too cute to be writing about something so viscerally powerful. Gellhorn is describing someone who has been tortured for a very long time using very brutal techniques. The description of the fingernails is a very strong image. However, when Gellhorn simply described this man as a “graduate” of torture, I think she is a little off the mark if she is trying to show her readers the intense pain and agony that this man went through to be able to survive such a thing.
Gellhorn’s use of long parenthetical breaks in her story works well as a means of taking the reader away from the main scene to illustrate other aspects of the war. They work a bit like flashbacks, interrupting the account of her stay with the Hernandez family to take the reader to another place and time. The two work very well to illuminate the effects of the war on the Spanish people. The straight account of the Hernandez family shows how the war has affected the specific family, giving the reader an intimate view of life during the war. The parenthetical passages show more broad happenings of the time, like the rows of starved and injured children laid up in a hospital or the five block long food lines filled with famished Spaniards.
Professor Good: The first post was what I had written before it was edited, and for some reason it didn't save. This is my final response.
“He was a somber man, whose teeth were irregularly broken, whose fingertips were nail-less pulp; the first graduate of Gestapo torture I had known.” Within this sentence, Gellhorn is describing a German anti-fascist refugee who was night patrol in the 11th International Brigade. This metaphor contains powerful images that will make Gellhorn’s readers cringe as their eyes pass along the words. She uses a physical description, the fingernails, and then directly connects that to the history of why this happened to him; showing her readers how she was shocked that he survived experiences most never do.
This image-invoking metaphor is well-written, but I think that she might have made the sentence a little too cute to be writing about something so viscerally powerful. Gellhorn is describing someone who has been tortured for a very long time with very brutal techniques. The description of the fingernails is a strong image. However, when Gellhorn simply described this man as a “graduate” of torture, I think she is a little off the mark if she is trying to show her readers the intense pain and agony that this man went through to be able to survive such a thing.
If this were a documentary film, the parenthetical passages work as the narrator, the voice-over that explains occasionally details about what it is you are seeing. It is the frame. The straight passages would be the actual emotion filled video that works in and out with the narration. It is the painting.
I've seen something similar to this before in some other literature but it is usually broken up by chapters, lines, rows of asterisks, or other such delineators. I think this is very clever. It's interesting when I think about what parentheses are used for in writing, and to use them on a grand scale like this is, for lack of better words, cool.
(Sorry! I was ready to go since Friday with this, but just got my Internet/cable back)
Martha Gellhorn's use of metaphor and similes are really interesting in this piece. She does not go crazy with these devices, rather- she uses them to describe the really heavy topics that say, an American whose never been exposed to war would never understand. Rather than describing the bombs flying over head, or sick children verbatim, which could have become droning and cliche, she uses similes and metaphors to word it in a way that's going to resonate with us, and create a meaningful, understandable image.
"And when we saw the bombers they were like tiny silver bullets moving forever up, across the sky"
"And there was another child, like an old-faced toy doll against the pillows, who turned away her head"
Although both these examples are successful, there was one simile in the piece I found particularly striking. When Gellhorn is describing the recently injured boy's mother: "She looked gaunt and a little mad and her voice was as harsh as stone scraping on stone." Gellhorn could have said "her voice was harsh and raspy" or something of that nature describing it, but no, her words specifically chosen create a sound, an image, and make it so much more meaningful for the reader.
* Sorry this is late, more than 24 hours late, I have been without power since Thursday night.
Gelhorn uses a few great metaphors to describe the ammunition in terms of what it meant to the Spainards and their sense of protection, pride and security: "The women were working at long tables, heaped with shinning black squares and oblongs, they looked like trays full of sequins." (430) Gelhorn continues on with girly descriptive language by using words like "pretty", "lovely", "carefully and daintly glued", "shining" "elegant" etc. to place emphasis on the women's sense of power and delight and sheer confidence in the "sequins" they are crafting. The power is their symbol of freedom and a successive win that they women seem to have a sense of honor to be creating, emphasized by the daughter who is "glowing with rouge, and quite well dressed". This image, to me, really connects with the passion and assurance of the last statement spoken by Mrs. Hernandez before Gelhorn leaves.
Sorry this is late! My Internet hasn’t been working!
I found this piece especially remarkable because of Gellhorn's ability to describe the beauty of Barcelona during such destruction. I've realized that throughout much of the story, many of the things she describes sound almost pleasant, mostly because of the citizen’s reactions. However, she has to ability to describe beauty yet subtlety makes the reader feel the immense pain and heartache that this country is experiencing. She never once says "and this was totally terrible" or anything of the sort. She just tells the story and the reader discerns that information through her descriptions. In the beginning, she describes walking through Las Ramblas and mentions that no one has food but then in the next sentence how everyone was outside enjoying the weather. She goes on to describe how people are commenting on what a beautiful day it is and how lovely everything around her looked. You could actually envision her walking down beautiful roads with bombs going off in the background. Though her characters are such strong people, you still feel pain for them, yet she makes it so she never has to explicitly mention the pain they are feeling. To answer your question, she does this when describing the children playing. She says that all the children were the color of the pillows. However, she describes this in the middle of them playing, something that is usually perceived as a happy activity. She compares playing children to a pale, lifeless object yet it works because it gives the reader a sense that life goes on. It shows them how strong the people are and in the midst of crisis they remain almost stoic in their reactions. She also describes the Spanish Republican army as a cheerful army, which are words that are not usually seen together. Gellhorn does this again when describing the movies and opera. She describes people sitting, laughing, though makes you aware that there are bombs going off. That the reason half the people were there is to get there minds off the fact that they are starving, yet you never doubt that they are enjoying themselves in times of crisis. She has a way of portraying happiness yet letting the reader really understand the destruction and disaster that Spain is experiencing.
Post a Comment