Mod C - "Love and Honour" quotes Flashcards
Metafiction example
“But you’re not under oath when writing a eulogy, and this is close enough.”
Autobiographical style
“If I had known then what I knew later, I wouldn’t have said the things I did. I wouldn’t have told him he didn’t understand - for clearly, he did.”
Characterisation - tension - burden/weight of his fathers expectations
“Here is what I believe: We forgive any sacrifice by our parents, so long as it is not made in our name. To my father there was no other name – only mine… To all that, I was inadequate.”
Contrasting characters (2 quotes) Strained relationship, distance and tension between Nam and Father
“‘They changed my flight in Los Angeles.’ ‘Why didn’t you ring?’ ‘I tried,’ he said equably. ‘No answer’”
“My father was drawn to weakness, even as he tolerated none in me.”
Figurative language - visual imagery
“I looked around. The desktop was gritty with cigarette ash. I threw some magazines over the roughest spots… I quickly gathered up the cigarette packs and sleeping pills and incense burners and dumped them all on a high shelf, behind my Kafka vintage classics.”
Sensory imagery - Olfactory
“The apartment smelled of fried garlic and sesame oil when I returned.”
Development of setting
“It always struck me how everything seemed larger in scale on Summit Street: the double story houses, their smooth lawns sloping down to the sidewalks like Golf Greens; elm trees with high, thick branches – the sort of branches from which I imagined father’s suspending long rope swings for daughter’s in white dresses.”
Structure (shifts to flashbacks) - 2 quotes
“I drank before I came here too”
Repetition of “If you ask me why I came to Iowa”
Dialogue - 2 quotes
“‘You’ll sleep in my room.’ … My father patted the futon in my living room. ‘I’ll sleep here.’”
“‘I thought you didn’t talk to him at all.’
‘He’s my father.’
‘What’s he want?’”
Literary allusions
“‘Faulkner, you know,’ my friend said over the squeals, ‘he said we should write about the old verities. Love and honour and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.’”
Metalanguage
“The fields are glass, I thought then tum-ti-ti, a dactyl, endline, then the words excuse and alloy in the line after.”
Final motif - displays the brittle nature of their relationship.
“And it occurred to me then how it took hours, sometimes days, for the surface of a river to freeze over – to hold in it’s skin the perfect and crystalline world – and how that world could be shattered by a small stone dropped like a single syllable.”
Sensory imagery - tactile
“he used to wake me, when I was young, by standing over me and smacking my cheeks lightly. I hated it - the wetness, the sourness of his hands”
Sensory imagery - aural
“Behind us six lanes of cars skidded back and forth across the wet grit of the road, the sound like the shredding of wind.”
Sensory imagery - Gustatory
“Massive fatty oysters dipped in salt-pepper-lemon paste. Boiled sea snails the size of pool balls. Southern-style shredded chicken salad, soaked in vinegar and eaten with spotty brown rice crackers.”
