Epicac analysis

Epicac

The story under the title «Epicac» was written by Kurt Vonnegut. The text under analysis belongs to science fiction. The genre is a short story, there are 6 pages long and there is 1 main plot line.

The text belongs to authentic sphere of communication. It addresses a wide circle of readers a number of problems are being considered, such as the problem of humanity and individuality.

The main function of the text is emotive, because the main character of this story made readers feel his emotions and feelings.

The type of thinking reflected in the text is figurative, because the text describes almost each of the characters, their occupation, their feelings, their origin. However not one of the characters is described physically.

“Epicac” consists almost entirely of narration and dialogue between two characters, a human and a computer and it’s told in the first person.

The abstract has 3 episodes: introduction is getting to know Epicac; climax is Epicac confesses his love to Pat and denouement is where Epicac self-destruct.

Paragraphs are long, sentences are long too, full of description and feelings. The author uses descriptive paragraphs to illustrate the main characters and narrative paragraphs to talk about their lives.

The number of characters is 3: the narrator, a woman named Pat, and a highly intelligent military computer. The narrator reveals quite a lot about himself. He is a mathematician who loves Pat Kilgallen, the girl he works with, but he has difficulty expressing emotion. And the largest computer in the world, which was create for military purposes. There are also used some stylistic devices, such as irony and humor, because of a love triangle between the narrator, a woman named Pat, and a highly intelligent military computer, and personification, when human qualities and actions are attributed to a machine.

The literary trend of the text (as revealed in the denouement) is fantastic, because it’s strange that the machine was able to fall in love with a human, and then self-destruct from unrequited love.

The text is told by the unnamed first-person narrator, who begins by discussing Epicac's origins and why he wants to tell Epicac's story.

General tone of the story is humorous and ironical on the one hand, because it’s about close relationship between humans and machines, and on the other hand is sentimental, because reader can sympathize with the machine that it can’t become a person.

The leading theme of the text passage is the machine is more human than the human characters around him. A machine created for war, which dies for love; inefficient in computing programs, but capable of writing great poems.

The scene is set in on the 4th floor of the physics building at Wyandotte College.

The main idea of the text passage is that sometimes people are very soulless, so there are so many wars and misunderstandings. They aren’t able to understand feel the people around them. Using the example of this story, people came up with a supercomputer not for peace, but for war, but even here the inanimate object turned out to be kind.

For me, this story is more tragic than ironic, because the higher intelligence in the form of a computer turned out to be more humane than many people, therefore many problems of humanity arise.