The Extract Under Analysis Is Taken from Sherwood Anderson's Short Story the Egg

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The extract under analysis is taken from Sherwood Anderson's short story The Egg (Published in 1921 in his collection of short stories The Triumph of the Egg) Sherwood Anderson is an American novelist and short story writer, known for subjective and self-revealing works. The passage is on the whole highly ironical. Mocking at 'the American passion for getting up in the world' the writer hyperbolizes the situation and employs various expressive means to achieve his aim of exposing the abnormality of the behaviour of people obsessed by the idea of making a fortune. The story is narrated in the first person by an unnamed narrator who is looking back at a period in his life when he was ten years old. The story is well-structured and may be divided into following parts: exposition – when the narrator was born and the mother induced the father to start chasing the American Dream, complication – renting some land to raise chickens in order to become richer, climax –a lot of disillusions about chickens, their tragic fates and then – denouement – thought of the narrator about having chosen the wrong path to the prosperity “That literature wasn’t written for you”. From the beginning of the story (and throughout) the reader becomes aware that Anderson is exploring the theme of ambition. There are a lot of stylistic devices in the whole extract, for example, in this part of the text, to stress the fact that the father of the young hero had had quite a long period of peaceful, non-ambitious life before marriage, the writer chooses the emphatic construction 'It was ... that' in which the middle part acquires additional stress and peculiar intonation. Then comes a euphemistic periphrasis for 'I was born' - 'I came wriggling and crying into the world' which creates a humorous effect due to two factors: (1) 'to come into the world' is a solemn high-flown expression which is

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