From Whispers by Dean Koontz

1. Read the extract bellow and say what it about.

2. State whether it is narration, description or exposition. Is it the first-person, the third-person or anonymous?

3. Divide the extract into logical parts and explain your choice.

4. Analyse the first paragraph of the extract:

1. What mood is imposed in it? What stylistic devices is this mood realized through?

2. What is wrong with the character?

3. Pick out different metaphors which illustrate the character's fear of loss? Why does she think that she did not deserve what she has?

4. How does the gradation of similes enhance her anxiety?

5. Analyse the second paragraph of the extract:

1. Is the mood of this paragraph the same? What stylistic device is responsible for this effect?

2. Speak of the character's childhood to explain why she was so afraid to lose what she had. Pick out all the necessary tropes and figures of speech for illustration of your conclusions.

3. What is the function of the represented speech at the end of the paragraph? How does it change the mood of the whole extract?

5. What is the message of the extract in your opinion?

She knew exactly what was wrong with her. Her jumpiness was a symptom of the I-don’t-deserve-all-this-happiness disease, a mental disorder with which she was intimately acquainted. She had come from nowhere, from nothing, and now she had everything. Subconsciously, she was afraid that God would take notice of her and decide that she didn’t deserve what she’d been given. Then the hammer would fall. Everything she had accumulated would be smashed and swept away: the house, the car, the bank accounts… her new life seemed like a fantasy, a marvelous fairytale, too good to be true, certainly too good to last.

No. Dammit, no! She had to stop belittling herself and pretending that her accomplishments were only the result of good fortune. Luck had nothing to do with it. Born into a house of despair, nurtured not with milk and kindness but with uncertainty and fear, unloved by her father and merely tolerated by her mother, raised in home where self-pity and bitterness had driven out all hope, she had of course grown up without a sense of real worth. For years she had struggled with an inferiority complex. Bit that was behind her now. Se had been through therapy. She understood herself. She didn’t dare those doubts rise again within her. The house and car and money would not be taken away; she did deserve them. She worked hard, and she had talent.

From Man and Boy by Tony Parson

1. Read the extract bellow and formulate its theme.

2. What narrative method and techniques are used in it? Come out with the examples from the extract to prove your opinion.

3. Does the opening sentence set the mood for the whole fragment? What mood is this? How do the first two paragraphs enhance it?

4. Why do Gina’s things “have to go”? Pick out the tropes that show the character’s attitude to them?

5. Find the paragraph, in which the character’s wife is described. What effect does she produce on the reader? What stylistic devices serve this purpose?

6. Analyse the part about the character’s removing Gina’s things:

1. Is it an easy job for him? Give evidence from the extract.

2. Find the metaphor which portrays the bookshelves after sorting out. How does it contribute to the general mood of the extract?

3. Analyse the paragraph, which begins with “Starting to sweat hard…” What device is used to show that there were a lot of Gina’s thigns around? Find the trope that expresses the man’s desire to rid of his wife’s possessions. Why are the things described “all trash now”?

4. Provide the figure of speech, which shows the man’s amazement at the quick result of his job.

5. Why do you think the man spent another two hours putting everything back in place? What stylistic devices are used by the author to show it? How do they contribute to the description of the character’s despair?

7. Speak about the message of the extract

Gina was gone and she was everywhere. The house was full of CDs I would never listen to (sentimental soul music about love lost and found), books I would never read (women struggling to find themselves in a world full of rotten men) and clothes I would never wear (skimpy M&S underwear)

And Japan. Lots of books about Japan. All the classic texts that she had urged me to read – Black Rain, Pink Samurai, Barefoot Gen, Memories of Silk and Straw – and a battered old copy of Snow Country, the one I had actually read, the love story she said I had to read if I was ever going to understand.

Gina’s things, and they chewed up my heart every time I saw them.

They had to go.

I felt bad about throwing it all out, but then if someone leaves you, they really should take their stuff with them. Because every time I saw one of her Luther Vandross records or Margaret Atwood novels or books about Hiroshima, I felt all the choking grief rise up inside me again. And in the end I just couldn’t stand it any more.

Gina, I thought, with her dreams of undying love and hard-won independence, Gina who could happily accommodate Naomi Wolf’s steely, post-feminist thoughts and Whitney Houston’s sweet nothings.

That was my Gina all right.

So I got to work, stuffing everything she had left behind into rubbish sacks. The first one was quickly full – did the women never throw anything away? – so I went back into the kitchen and got an entire roll of heavy-duty bin-liners.

When I had finished removing all her paperbacks, he bookshelves looked like a mouth full of broken teeth.

Throwing away her clothes was much easier because there was no sorting involved. Soon her side of our wardrobe was empty apart from mothballs and wire coat hangers.

I felt better already.

Starting to sweat hard, I prowled the house mopping up what was left of her presence. There were all the Japanese prints from her single days. A painting she had bought on our holiday to Antigua when Pat was a baby. A pink razor on the edge of the bath. A couple of Gong Li videos. And a photograph of our wedding day with her looking like the most beautiful girl in the world and me grinning like a happy, dopey bastard who never believed he could get so lucky.

All trash now.

Finally, I looked in the laundry basket. Among Pat’s Star Wars pajamas and my faded Calvins there was the old Cap T-shirt that Gina liked to sleep in. I sat on the bottom of the stairs holding that T-shirt for a while, wondering what she was sleeping in tonight. And then I threw it into the last rubbish sack.

It’s amazing how quickly you can remove the evidence of someone’s life from the house. It takes so long to put your mark on a home, and so little time to wipe it away.

Then I spent another two hours fishing it all of the rubbish sacks and carefully returning the clothes, the CDs, the books, the prints and everything else to exactly where I had found them.

Because I missed her. I missed her like mad.

And I wanted all her things to be just as she had left them, all ready and waiting for her in case she ever felt like coming back home.