Language
An overview of the language of “How the Nurse Feels” by Greg Changnon reveals a simple rather colloquial choice of words, meant to reflect the narrator’s identity, who is a teenager at the end of the '90s. The semantic fields used reflect the school theater context (the narrator and her friends are staging Romeo and Juliet) and elements of small-town living.
Irony and sarcasm play an important role in conveying the narrator’s personality through language: “Tiger is the Apothecary. He’s only in one scene at the end of the play, which is all he could probably manage.” (ll. 32-33) and “They both wear open raincoats. It looks like they’ve gotten the season wrong.” (ll. 156-157)
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Apart from these features, the author also uses a few language features and linguistic devices that we outline below:
- Similes and metaphors
- Hyperboles
- Rhetorical question
- Repetition
- Symbols
Similes and metaphors
Although multiple comparisons are used in the text, only one simile is used to make the description more emphatic: “her fingers wiggle on her belly like hooked fish” (ll. 185). An example of an extended comparison is “looking at me like no other high school guy” (l. 41).
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Repetition
Several repetitions make the text more emphatic and help the author convey the narrator’s way of thinking or stress her wishes and desires: "‘Did he run away?’ I think that no, he didn’t run away. To run away sounds so preteen. He didn’t run away. He got the hell out of here." (ll. 83-85);
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Symbols
A number of symbols (words or images which have an additional meaning to their literal one) are also constructed in the text.
The apothecary from Romeo and Juliet that Tiger plays is an ironical foreshadowing symbol. In Shakespeare’s play the apothecary is a symbol of death; in “How the Nurse Feels”, Tiger dies.
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