The Death of Benny Paret

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The Death of Benny Paret: Unseen Prose Analysis ‘The Death of Benny Paret’ by Norman Mailer is an adaptation of the Boxing match of 1962, of which resulted in the death of Benny Paret, as the title tells us. This piece of prose depicts the way in which Paret is killed. The prose is split into three sections, quite typically; the introduction to Paret, the body of the fight, and then finally the conclusion of not only the text but also the life of Benny Paret. From the beginning, we see events unfold as a first person narrative, and this is how we interpret. We are given a glimpse into Paret from a by-stander to the event, it seems. All throughout introducing Paret, Norman Mailer completely glorifies Paret as the hero of the tale, being completely biased to him throughout and Griffiths entirely illustrated as the villain. This concept is kept up during the text and both Paret and Griffiths are categorised in an animalistic sense. For example, “Griffith was in like a cat ready to rip the life out a huge boxed rat” insinuating that Griffith is the cat. Also, the lexical choices of Mailer with words such as “caught” and “trapped” give the continued idea of the traditional ‘cat and mouse’. With the tone of the prose being that of biased to Paret, the mood is graphically brutal and that of death Mailer presents a semantic field of death, and his use of very vivid similes and metaphors which help to emphasise the brutality of said simile. For example, “he had left the garden; he was back on a hoodlum’s street”. This metaphor is one that represents the realism of the situation and grounds us to what has actually happened. Mailer writes that “he hit him eighteen times in a row, an act which took perhaps three or four seconds”. Mailer uses overstatement and imagery to cleverly tell us of how Paret was actually killed. We’re able to appreciate the cruelty of the actual

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