I found David Sedaris' "What I Learned" to be the most compelling to write about. First of all, it was hilarious: not in the sense that I boisterously rumbled the room with my bellowing laughter, but in the sense that it was heavily witty with some tongue-in-cheek bitterness. The borderline bizarre amount of exaggeration Sedaris wrote with *showed* a real sense of how he felt about much of his education:
"To anyone holding a tool or a weapon, we were trained to respond, 'What? Me go to college?' If, on the other hand, the character held a degree, you were allowed to say, 'Sort of,' or, sometimes, 'I think so'"(p27)
He illustrated generalizations and judgements through his use of imagery. Needless to say, his father never "[...]adjusted his makeshift turban and sketched a mustache on [his] mother's upper lip,"(p30) but by taking the paranoia of his parents to this level, he keeps the reader hooked by amusing them, while, on a different level, acutely demonstrated how his parents felt through wildly inaccurate means. The fact that creative writing thrives off of such indirect and abstract methods of self-expression is what keeps it mentally stimulating. Completely bereft of imagery, a written piece would be completely dry, and "What I learned" would be an excerpt from an auto-biography that was written like an like an article from a scientific journal.
I agree, I also believe that imagery is a key component in creative writing, one without which any story would be reduced to a mere two dimensional, so to speak, objective account of events, people, etc. I also agree that humor is key in grasping the readers and compelling them to crave for more.
ReplyDeleteArta, glad you liked this piece! We'll read more Sedaris this semester. You have done a good job of discussing the way he uses imagery here. What else do you think is going on? Are there metaphors? Extended metaphor? What do you think?
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