Genre.

The exemplar romance genre.

• The narrative is in the third person - restricted narrative voice.
• From the female point of view, her thoughts and feelings are focused on.
• Colour - description of red, associated with love, danger, dark and sexy. She is marked out as different (everyone is in black).
• Red lips - confidence, attention seeking, drama, sexual (connotations of red)
• Sentences structures: various lengths and types. Shows control.
• Idealised body descriptions - superficial - lexical choices to associate perfection "flawless body", "custom-made suit" - wealthy & power, attractive.
• Mask = mysteriousness
• Narrative voice - because we are seeing it from her pov, we don't know who is it, the mask is the narrator.
• Secrecy - "hidden", "masks"
• feeling very conscious; narrative female voice, stereotype of women being self-conscious.
• Details of backstory drop in.
• Connotations - erotic.
• New York fitting in with the theme of glamour, power, wealth. - City living.
• Cliché & stereotypes.
• Superficial - she and the man are objects.
• Connecting - story is about.
• innuendo - sexual connotations, interpreted in other ways.  

AHWOSG - Dave Eggers

Dave Eggers:

- Mother is the star of the story in the beginning; he mainly focused on her and her illness.
- Parents both died of cancer, his mother died first then 32 days later his dad died.
- Cared for his 8 year old brother, at the age of 21 becomes his brothers keeper.
- Being his brothers keeper led to his story.
- Themes of death and responsibility.
- He had appeared four times since 1998 and his work is not pure non-fiction, it is fictionalized.
- He has been acknowledged for his limitations (autobiography)
- Him and his brother move from Chicago to California.
- He tried to get into Television, MTV and documented his auditions and turns them into postmodern commentaries on his own self-conscious self-promotion.
- Themes of Self-awareness.
- He could of become a book reviewer.
- Without his tragedy he could've become a novelist.
- The beginning of the autobiography starts with his mother, talking of his relationship with his mother and her illness.
- Describes to MTV what is was like to grow up in Lake Forest in Chicago.
- Part of generation X
- Title is described as "hyperbolic"

AHWOSG - Extract from page 3/4

Page 3/4

This extract is about Dave Eggers' mother and her illness, "they took my mothers stomach out about six months ago..." suggesting she is seriously, terminally ill. Eggers' plays with various tenses and speaks of this as if it was literally six months ago, this shows his memory of his mother and her illness is very raw and it is still there, clear. Eggers states "there wasn't a lot left to remove" this shows his mother has had her stomach removed gradually to get rid of the illness. "They tied the [something] to the [something], hoped that they had removed the offending portion" the use of the parentheses, shows he hasn't got the language to described explicitly what the medial terms are because he does not care for them, he is less interested in the scientific side of it and is more interested in the literary side. Eggers' mother goes onto chemotherapy and later finds out the doctors didn't remove all of the cancer and unfortunately it had grown and spread across her body. "It had grown, it had come back, it had laid eggs" the use of repetition triad "it had", describes the process of the cancer growing and Eggers' refers the cancer to an alien "it was stuck to the side of the spaceship." Eggers talks of his mothers progress during cancer and how she wore wigs while her hair began to grow back, as if she is getting better however "six months later she began to have the pain again" he asked "was it indigestion?" this shows Eggers' hope that his mother is not getting worse again, he knows the cancers back however he uses indigestion as a way of hope.

KEY THEMES: death, family relationships and change.

AHWOSG - Structure of sentences:

Sentence types and function

Minor: "bump."
Simple: "I went to Tesco."
Compound: "I went to Tesco but forgot my shopping list."
Complex: "I went to Tesco. In order to get there, I had to drive."
____________________________________________________________________________________




Page 14 - "I have plans for them... i'll run them over with my car."

• Various declaratives - to show what he would like to do to his neighbours and people who are looking in and know there situation.
• Hyphens used with embedded clauses - punctuation used relating to his state of mind (wild)
• Exclamatory sentences used to exaggerate his imagination of the people he hurts are saying.
• "I'll run them over with my car." - simple sentence, only one used within the paragraph. Sums up his emotion, of anger, scared, upset.
• Mainly a lot of on-going complex sentences to link to the complexity of the ways in which he wants to hurt these people who know his situation.
• "nosy", "inquisitive", "pitying" - lexis used linking to grief or an after death situation; also the italics of the neighbours speaking are related to these words. "I hear she's" (nosy); "what will happen to that little poor bo-" (inquisitive); "Jesus Christ I'm sorry" (pity).
• A lot of the complex sentences and description relates to his continuous anger towards these people who are gossiping; and it also adds to his detail to his fantasy of killing everyone who knows.
• The detail when he explains what he is going to do to those people; show his wild imagination/fantasy and also show his emotions.
• brief psychopathic moment; led on by a family walking by- which leads to him being paranoid and fantasising what he is going to do to those who knows.
• "I have plans for them" - he's thought about it a lot, obsession with death due to his situation.
• These fantasy's occur while mother is having a nosebleed - distracting mechanism.
• Emotional state - fragmented broken mind, like the embedded clauses. First time in the book displaying his real emotion; imaginative life he has, he is a dreamer.
• Punctuation used to show what his state of mind was like during that time.
• The detail of the pain "I pull out hearts and intestines" - symbolises his mother and her pain. He wants them to feel his mothers pain.
• Violence - normality, choice of verbs he uses to show his violence. Violent imagery.
• interrogative "can't you see it?" to interrupt his own narrative; to check if the reader is following his train of thought.