Commentary on Bad Blood by Lorna Sage

624 Words3 Pages
This passage by Lorna Sage starts with an effective opening, as the first sentence ’So the playground was hell’ grabs the reader’s attention instantly and leads one directly into the tone and mood that the passage carries. The immediate and drastic image of the playground being referred to as hell is rather ironic and contradictory since a playground commonly is seen as something innocent and playful. We can therefore already from the beginning suspect a fairly gloomy and miserable text. This feeling is ensured even more by the diction that follows; “Chinese burns, pinches, slaps and kicks” and “face-pulling, hair-pulling, pinching, scratching” which accordingly are not pleasant thus backing up the miserable feeling. The passage tells us about an anxious little girl who goes to school for the first time. This experience of childhood and initiation in school life is described as something horrible and negative; “The playground was hell”, “Small people’s purgatory” and “the sheer ineptitude”. The diction with words such as purgatory (a place for suffering) and ineptitude (uselessness/to not fit in) enhances this negative mood. Sage speaks a lot about not fitting in and she describes the children’s playing as “fierce contests…duels almost” which clashes with our general view of children being so innocent when they play. Sage’s style of narration is fairly colloquial, almost chatty, which can be seen for example the line “Was she already going to dancing lessons? I don’t remember” where we can see the persona discussing with herself. This style of narration gives the passage an informal but also agitated mood which goes well the content; a playground described as hell. The relationship between the narrator and Gail is developed throughout the passage in an interesting way. The narrator starts out by describing Gail as superior; “she was so physically confident in

More about Commentary on Bad Blood by Lorna Sage

Open Document