Written Commentary on Extract 'Polar Breath'

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Written Commentary: Polar Breath by MusloDePollo In this extract from Polar Breath, by Dianne Glancy, the protagonist is characterized as a depressed and extremely paranoid widow. She roams her house blaming ‘ghosts’ for all the misfortune in her life, especially during the winter, while looking deeper into her thoughts and actions driven by hopelessness and desperation . Right from the start of the passage, the protagonist seems melancholic and lonely as she observes the ‘frail little birds’ from her house, and wishing she could keep them warm inside her house. Her craving for sheltering the birds is primarily due to her loneliness, as she recalls living with her husband before he passed away. The author’s diction sets one of the major themes in the story, as well as the mood around the widow, and lets the reader know exactly how she feels by the use of imagery. Words such as ‘frozen’, ‘little ice-cubes’, ‘blue and cold’, also help create the setting in the story, a stale winter atmosphere, where everything is motionless, lonely and lifeless, including herself. In addition, this constant use of descriptive language, the color blue, the frozen scenery, are all associated with the feeling of sadness the protagonist feels during this time of year. The protagonist sees the spirits as the cause of her misfortune. An example of this is near the beginning of the passage, when the narrator comments on how “they had snipped another detail from the world” (line 11). The third person narrator is neutral towards the existence of the ghosts, and takes them as part of the protagonist’s world. However, when the narrator claims that the spirits took ‘details’ from the world, it becomes a reality in the widow’s perspective, and an excuse for her possible memory loss. This means that as things are going odd in her life, like finding the empty corn kernel or the way she
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