A SAMPLE OF ANALYSIS

George Saunders is a New York Times bestselling American writer of short stories, essays, novellas and children's books. Saunders' fiction often focuses on the absurdity of consumerism and corporate culture and the role of the mass media. Many of these same works also deal with philosophical questions of morality. The tragicomic element, concurrently devastating and wildly funny, has earned Saunders comparisons to Kurt Vonnegut, a writer to whom Saunders has acknowledged a debt.

In G.Saunder’s story "Pastoralia," his satire of the modern workplace, we find particularly mixed, clichéd, and long-winded metaphors in the missives the self-serving manager, Nordstrom, sends to the protagonist:

“Think of you and Janet as branches on a tree. While it's true that a branch sometimes needs to be hacked off and come floating down, so what, that is only one branch, it does not kill the tree, and sometimes one branch must die so that the others may live. And anyway, it only looks like death, because you are falsely looking at this through the lens of an individual limb or branch, when in fact you should be thinking in terms of the lens of what is the maximum good for the overall organism, or tree. When we chop one branch, we all become stronger! And that branch on the ground, looking up, has the pleasure of knowing that he or she made the tree better, which I hope Janet will do. Although knowing her? With her crappy attitude? Probably she will lie on the ground wailing and gnashing her leaves while saying swear words up at us. But who cares! She is gone. She is a goner. And we have you to thank. So thanks!”

Here, the manager starts with the kind of clichéd metaphor that could easily come out of a management handbook: the tree is the organization and the workers are the branches. But the unedited metaphor goes on and on, becoming more muddled, until the "branch" called Janet is "gnashing her leaves." Nordstrom compares sacking the members of his staff with “chopping the tree” considering this step as a revitalizing and healthy. He thinks about the whole “tree” but not of its separate “branch” and he actually doesn’t care about one more “sick branch” – Janet.(One reviewer commented that Saunders' characters talk as though they'd "read The Elements of Styles and decided to ignore as many of the important suggestions as possible.") The effect is a bit of a shock, so great his cynicism and indifference are, and it tells us a lot about the manager – his own career-minded person who is not going to soften or humanize the situation. He uses words to try and obscure his real meanings, and he doesn't have the intelligence or the discipline to do even that well. So themetaphors in this text are bad, i.e. reveal the lowest, abhorrent, and lousy traits of the manager’s character and embody the absurdity of the protagonist's situation. The tree as a metaphor is usually based on something positive and encouraging giving hope (good) while in this text the image commonly associated with the tree is somewhat perverted and crooked (bad). Thus the otherwise trite metaphor changes its semantic and stylistic value and becomes rather original.

No matter what type of metaphor is under analysis the stylistic function of any metaphor is to create an image through fresh and original associations, hidden comparisons, unusual and sometimes incredible mental connections between otherwise incomparable objects or phenomena, which reveal the essence of the character in question. The imagery is important in both poetry and prose and metaphor is the SD which says much with little and scarce means. W.Shakespeare, J.Donne, W.H.Auden, J.Carry, R.Chandler, R.Frost, A.Huxley, O.Wilde are widely recognised masters of metaphor.

Date: 2015-12-24; view: 1036