Language

Style of language in lines 9-20

The exam question from the STX English A exam on May 20th 2020 asks you to focus on the style of writing in lines 9-20 of “Walk Don’t Run” by Douglas Bruton.

In this passage, the narrator remembers her grandmother’s stories about gutting fish and describes her grandmother as the narrator views her now.

 The description of the fish being gutted is unusually explicit (ll. 9-11), with many graphic images describing the “shit”, “guts”, and “mess” that this process involves. The further emphasis on the grandmother’s free use of the word “shit” further helps emphasize that the grandmother worked in an environment where hard manual labor and coarse language was common, perhaps suggesting that she belonged to the lower classes.

The segment also contains elements of spoken language, for example, the frequent use of interjections along with examples of incomplete sentences: “Too soon, she once said, too soon a bride; I did not know why it was too soon.” The use of elements from spoken language helps emphasize the fact...