Katherine Anne Porter is an American writer of the beginning of the 20th century. She was a woman of diverse interests who managed to balance between her careers in writing, journalism, and even politics. Her career of a writer started in the 1920s with the story “Maria Concepcion”. In 1928 she wrote the story “Rope” which is, like most of her stories, based on her personal experience. This short story is notable for its use of free indirect conversation which represents a variety of points of view of the protagonist(s), and comic, sometimes sarcastic, narration. The extract under analysis is from the story “Rope” by Katherine Anne Porter. It is full of various stylistic devices and graphic means, such as different kinds of repetition, beat, tropes and interesting vocabulary.
The text under consideration is a third-person narration. An extract can be divided into four logical parts where a young married couple is having a disagreement: firstly, there comes the information about the squeezed eggs; secondly, protagonists try to find out the reason for the crash; thirdly, a reader can observe helplessness and frustration of the protagonist; and, finally, overwhelming anger is possible to observe due to the skillful use of stylistic devices. Stylistic devices such as repetition were used to emphasize certain elements in the mind of the reader. Several kinds of repetition can be found in the excerpt under analysis. They are anadiplosis (as in “…look, look, look” (1)), anaphora (for instance, “Squeezed, who had squeezed them” (3)), epanalepsis (such as “… it seemed to him they might very well cook the meat at the same time they cooked the eggs and the warm up the meat for tomorrow” (14-16)), epistrophe in such sentences as “Warmed-over meat, when they might as well have had it fresh. Second best and scraps and makeshifts, even to the meat!” (16-17) and “…could surely manage somehow when she turned on him and said, if he told her they could manage somehow she would certainly slap his face” (20-21), and alliteration as in “…whole wide world to witness” (7-8).
Sometimes the same phrases can serve as both, repetition and a conjunction pattern. Three different kinds of conjunction patterns can be found in the extract under consideration. Thus, for instance, syndeton can be observed in the sentences “He had carried the rope in one hand and the basket in the other” (8-9) and “This time she hissed and almost clawed” (19). Polysyndeton can be found in the following sentences: “Second best and scraps and makeshifts” (17) and “…he would rub her shoulder and she would arch and purr” (18-19). And lastly, asyndeton is also present in the extract. It can be observed in two sentences: “…she was a little disappointed about the coffee, and oh, look, look, look at the eggs!” (1), as well as in the sentence “That was the heaviest thing in the pack, she saw him plainly when he came in from the road, the rope was a big package on top of everything” (6-7).
Punctuation also plays an important part in text production due to its helping in differentiating between affirmative and exclamatory sentences. Affirmative sentences in this very text present narrative sentences. Exclamatory sentences serve to describe extra-emotive utterances. As the situation that happened with the protagonists frustrated them deeply, the text is full of exclamatory sentences. Though I did not find any case of using a semi-colon as there is no case of extremely complicated sentence structures, I have picked some other interesting punctuation symbols from the stylistic point of view in the text. These symbols can be found in the following sentences: “He had carried the rope in one hand and the basket in the other, and what was the use of her having eyes if that was the best they could do for her?”(8-9) and “What had he put on top of them? Hadn’t he known eggs mustn’t be squeezed?”(2). It seems that the primary function of the interrogation mark in these sentences is not asking a question, but making a sarcastic remark. Quite interesting in terms of using punctuation marks is the sentence “…she could see one thing plain: no eggs for breakfast” (10). Here a colon creates a special and rather significant impact beyond the norm; it eliminates any other variant of successive development of events.
As the sentence structure is rather simple, there are no cases of periodic sentences in the text under consideration, but some cases of loose sentences are present. These sentences are “That was the heaviest thing in the pack, she saw him plainly when he came in from the road, the rope was a big package on top of everything” (6-7) and “He had carried the rope in one hand and the basket in the other, and what was the use of her having eyes if that was the best they could do for her?” (8-9).
As for the vocabulary, I chose several words and expressions that to my mind fit the plot of the text perfectly. For instance, an obscene word is used in the sentence “It was too damned bad” (11). Here it has several meanings: firstly, we can completely understand the protagonist’s feelings, secondly, can judge upon the background, education, lifestyle and even habits of the protagonists. Other interesting word-combinations used are “arch and purr” (17) and “hissed and almost clawed” (17). In the sentence in which these word-combinations are used, we can observe a case of onomatopoeia (“hiss”); in addition, here a woman is compared first with a kind cat that likes to snuggle up, then with a furious one whose territory was invaded.
On the whole, the language of the story is rather simple, which makes us think of the simplicity of the character’s lifestyle and non-noble background. We can notice the beat (line scansion) in some cases, it has different meanings, such as irritation, sarcasm, fear. It is especially noticeable in such sentences as “…and oh, look, look, look at the eggs!” (1); “If they got broke it was the grocer’s fault” (4); “What had he put on top of them?” (2); “Hadn’t he known eggs mustn’t be squeezed?” (2); and “Cool place!” (14).
The text is completed as a narration without any flashbacks, foreshadows, dialogues, insertions or descriptions. It is only divided into logical parts with the help of paragraphs. Complete stories can be produced in this style when the character’s speech is represented with neither quotative frames of indirect speech nor the punctuation marks of the direct speech. Thus, the paragraph division is obvious as one paragraph stands for a woman’s speech while another for a man’s one.
Reference
The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter (paperback ed.); Katherine Anne Porter.