A Short Digest of a long Novel

A Short Digest of a long Novel

1.The text under analysis is a short story “A Short Digest of a long Novel” by Budd Schulberg. It belongs to fiction. The genre is a short story because it has an open ending and finished plot.

2.The text belongs to aesthetic sphere of communication. It addresses a wide circle of readers, because a lot of people can find the reflection of their own life in the story.

3.The main functions of the text are emotive, sentimental and educational, because this story made readers feel emotions, feelings, the flow of thoughts of the character. Also this story allows the readers to get an instructive lesson.

4.The type of thinking reflected in the text is figurative, because the text describes the personality of the character, their thoughts and attitude to each other, life and actions. There are some stylistic devices in this text. The metaphor “her delicate features were chiseled from a solid block” shows that the little girl was treated by her father like a princess, like a treasure. A simile “ugly and cold as unwashed dishes from last night`s dinner lying in the sink” which is referred to lies. The author uses sexual imagery, non-childish descriptions at all: “Her legs were shapely and firm”, “as a work of art”, et cetera. It is impossible to predict that such words would refer to a little girl.

5.The story is told by 3rd person (father).

6.The story has 3 episodes:

The introduction – The story begins with the father describing his daughter, he is playing with her in a jump, and then a neighbor brings her son to their house.

Climax— when the little girl stands on the table, she is going to jump, but Billy does not catch her.

The Denouement – when the girl fell to the floor, and her father comforted her and told her not to cry.

7.Paragraphs are short, sentences are short too. Despite the briefness, the text quite fully describes the feelings of the characters, their attitude to each other.

8.The number of characters is limited: there are the father, the little girl and Billy.

The father: overprotective of his daughter, rarely spent time with her because of employment, built a trusting relationship with his daughter, tried to protect her from bad.

The little girl: the girl was only 3 years old, but she was already vain. Her father called her an ideal, untouched, flawless.

Billy: the boy was a sturdy, good-looking, big for his age, aggressively unchildlike, a malicious, arrogant, insensitive extrovert.

9.The literary of the text is realistic, because in some family parents can face with such a problem about overprotection their children.

10.The author presents in the text is not committed and we see it through the eye of the narrator (father). Everything happens without author’s opinion.

11.The general tone of the story is educational and sentimental, because there some descriptions, where the father takes care of his daughter and worries a lot when she fell and it hurt her.

12.The leading theme of the text passage is in the life one has to learn that there are some you can trust and some you can’t.

13.There is 1 symbol in this story: it’s a jumping game. The game symbolizes the trust that people have to each other.

14.The scene is set in in the house where they spend time with his beloved daughter.

15.There is no flashback in this story.

16.The main idea of the text passage is that this situation shows that not everything in the world is perfect. Good-looking people can turn out to be bad, this explains why you can't trust everyone around, anyone can turn out to be a traitor.

17.For me this story is quite interesting and instructive. All people go through lies and betrayal, the main thing is not to stop believing in good people, not to reject the whole world.