Carol Ann Duffy Stealing

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Essay What points is Duffy making in ‘Stealing’? What techniques does she use to make her ideas clear? In the poem ‘Stealing’ Carol Ann Duffy represents the idea of life without purpose and the mental breakdown that gradually follows in a number of techniques. The techniques are used to deliver and portray her ideas to the readers clearly and vividly. Through the use of effective structural confusion, diction, enjambment and irregular structuring; Duffy represents life without purpose and the result of it through the thief’s ideas of loss of direction, the attempts made by the thief to reassemble his/her life and to conform into society and the anti-social actions of the thief. In the poem ‘Stealing’ Duffy presents her idea of life without purpose through the thief’s loss of direction in life. The structural confusion in the form of enjambment is utilised to convey her ideas clearly and to imply the thief’s disjointed mind. ‘Sometimes I steal things I don’t need. I joy ride cars to nowhere, break into houses just to have a look’. The thief leads a purposeless and an indecisive life, performing actions that will lead him ‘nowhere’ in life. Duffy uses enjambment to signify the word ‘nowhere’ to portray that the thief has no direction in life. In addition, the adverb ‘just’ emphasizes the loss of direction; the thief has no reasonable purpose in his actions. ‘Maybe pinch a camera’, this effective enjambment breaks the five line stanza, and draws attention to the noun ‘camera’. A mechanism used by people to capture memories, which the thief does not possess. The noun ‘camera’ therefore reflects back to the loneliness and purposelessness of the thief. Furthermore, another form of enjambment is ‘I took a run and booted him’, after he fails to ‘reassemble’ the snowman correctly. The thief denies believing he cannot recreate and fix ‘him’, the snowman; however
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