I looked at the long, skinny pencil with its white rubber head and pointy lead hat on the other end. Maybe if I looked hard enough it would wake up. The pencil woke up, its eyes appeared magically in the middle of the pencil and it stood up and started moving its body in circles writing huge letters across the paper. “You moron” I thought to myself, a pencil can’t wake up. I shook my head vigorously to clear the perfect image out of my head. What if I touched it? My finger slowly moved towards the pointy lead hat and as soon as I felt it prick my skin, a huge pair of black eyes bulged out of the pencil. It blinked. The white rubber head and pointy lead hat extended and bent to grip the paper. It looked like a two legged dog trotting along the paper. It started dancing and shaking one leg, then the other, and then altogether every part of its body was quivering. Within a millisecond, a huge BANG and there was crushed pieces of lead and shards of pencil falling in the air. I looked down at my hand and saw my finger in contact with a tiny shard of lead. I pulled it back instantly and squeezed my eyes shut as hard as I could. Opening them slowly, I looked down at where the pencil was before it exploded and it was laying there asleep like nothing had happened.
Hi Monique,
ReplyDeleteI think that you have portrayed the character very well by describing himself imagining the pencil coming alive, showing how he might be reaching the point of insanity, a very important trait of the character.
The word choice in your pastiche is good, since you were able to portray the character's senses focusing on how things felt in his hand or the very small details in the pencil. However, I sometimes found it rather odd, maybe too modern for the author and the character. I think that words such as moron, and "bang" are not those that the author would use to describe this moment.
The structure also imitates the author very well since you have used rhetorical questions and very descriptive sentences, which I believe are used a lot by the author.
I think that you really described the character well. The way his mind pictures things happening, that aren't actually there. Though i think Javiera is right. I don't think the author would use words like moron or bang. I also think the way he goes into the imagining process without actually telling us he's imagining it until its over, is very similar to what the author does.
ReplyDeleteWhile this scene successfully portrayed Hamsun's style whilst describing the protagonists hunger driven insanity, it didn't really follow the same style. The pastiche related to the the book more on a plot driven level than on a stylistic level. The diction used is both appropriate, when describing banal things with intricate and complex diction, and inappropriate due to the use of words that that had not been coined or used frequently during the 1920s. Furthermore the sentence structure is also half on and half off. On one side the use of rare, economic sentences to make an aspect stand out was almost identical to the authors use. Unfortunately these did not stand out enough due to the absence of the run-on behemoths. These monster sentences, which dominate the novel, were, by far, the greatest absence in the pastiche. While long sentences did exist, they were not the giant sentences from hunger which are easily divisible into three to four sentences. Finally the punctuation diversity was also lacking. The only marks similar to Hamsun's were the lonely question marks and the commas, thus leaving out the exclamation marks, colons, and semicolons that dot the pages of Hunger in herd like quantities. Overall this pastiche succeed to relate to Hunger's plot, but had some fatal flaws in the stylistic representation.
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