From Touching The Void Flashcards
“I felt a shattering blow in my knee, felt bones splitting, and screamed” (Line 2)
Violent images
“Simon would be ripped off the mountain. He couldn’t hold it” (Line 5-6)
Future tense- makes it more immediate/punchy
“The impact catapulted me…” (Line 3)
Catapulted - metaphor -> word used outside of its normal context
Other stuff in PARAGRAPH 1
- High concentration of (violent) dynamic verbs
- Short sentences -> Simple -> happening in quick succession/rapidly
- Past tense (autobiography) -> Some of paragraph is also future
“Everything was still, silent” (Line 8)
Contrast to first paragraph
Sibilance/alliteration
“Then pain flooded down my thigh- a fierce burning fire” (Line 9)
Flooded and fire = Mixed metaphor
“Building and building” (Line 10) , “My leg!.. My leg!” (Line 11)
Repetition
Other stuff in PARAGRAPH 2
- Descriptive
- Dramatic paragraph
- Lots of metaphors
“I didn’t connect it with the pain which burnt my groin”(Line 15)
Burnt = continued extended metaphor
“The pain eased” (Line 17)
Lifts tension
“A wave of nausea surged over me” (Line 19)
Water metaphor (cont)
“I’m dead” (Line 22)
Short effective sentence
Other stuff in PARAGRAPH 4
- Lots of ellipses -> Show broken though process and panic
- Direct thought in inverted commas
“My knee exploded” (Line 25-26) etc
Strong imagery
“Bone grated, and the fireball rushed from groin to knee” (Line 26)
Fireball = continued metaphor
Strong imagery
Other stuff in PARAGRAPH 5
- Ellipsis at the end of paragraph is EDITED TEXT
- Lots of violent images
- Lots of short sentences
“I felt my head spin” (Lin 32-33)
Idiom (metaphor) - conventional word/phrase that is a metaphor
“And it seemed to grow with every second that I stared” (Line 37)
Subjective perception
“I would never get over it” (Line 38)
Double meaning
“I could feel myself teetering on the edge of it” (Line 42)
Double meaning
Other stuff in PARAGRAPH 6
- Uses more context
- Emotive language
- Direct thought
Stuff in PARAGRAPH 7
Talks about feelings to engage reader
“Suddenly”, “lashed out taut”, “braced myself” etc
Violent words
“Breaking trail” (Line 45), “Crested the rise” (Line 56)
Words from the semantic field
“You’re dead”, “I might also die”, “knew he was dead” (paragraph 11)
Repetition
“It was all totally rational” and the rest of paragraph 11
Simon is persuading himself and the reader
Other stuff In PARAGRAPH 11
-2nd person thought
Other stuff in PARAGRAPH 12
- Thinking about himself -> repetition of ‘I’ / first person pronoun
- Simon appears ‘calloused’
