Thesis Draft
Emily Getz
Every second of life is a second closer to death. That’s the problem with death every happy moment is a dreaded moment. Every second your life becomes better or more enjoyable it’s a second closer to being over. Joyce Carol Oates wields imagery, diction, repition, and detail choice to display Judson Mulvaney as a lonely adolescent who has come to the realization of inevitable death. Judd is a lonely adolescent grasping the ideas of death, while sitting on his bike looking at the river over the rotted railing he begins to see all the dead/dying objects around him. While doing so he begins to relate it to him own self, repeating the same words over and over again. “Every heartbeat is past and gone! Every heartbeat is past and gone” In his discovery of death, he questions whether anyone else knows or has thought of death. At the end of the passage Judd thinks to himself about who he would lose, and who would lose him. “Not just that I would lose the people I loved, but they would lose me. And they knew nothing of it. (Did They?) And I, just a skinny kid, the runt of the litter at High Point Farm, would have to pretend not to know what I knew.” Throughout the passage Judd relates many objects in nature to life and the way it slowly fades away. “When dry yellow leaves (like on the birches) don’t fall from a tree the tree is partly dead.” In this quote he’s relating the trees dying to people dying. He realizes that being a young boy he must have had to replace someone else’s young boy who’s no longer a young boy. “Though on a farm living things are dying, dying, dying all the time and many have been names, and others are born taking their places not even knowing that they are taking the places of those who have died” In this quote he’s realizing the circle of life and the way that life and death continues on and
Every second of life is a second closer to death. That’s the problem with death every happy moment is a dreaded moment. Every second your life becomes better or more enjoyable it’s a second closer to being over. Joyce Carol Oates wields imagery, diction, repition, and detail choice to display Judson Mulvaney as a lonely adolescent who has come to the realization of inevitable death. Judd is a lonely adolescent grasping the ideas of death, while sitting on his bike looking at the river over the rotted railing he begins to see all the dead/dying objects around him. While doing so he begins to relate it to him own self, repeating the same words over and over again. “Every heartbeat is past and gone! Every heartbeat is past and gone” In his discovery of death, he questions whether anyone else knows or has thought of death. At the end of the passage Judd thinks to himself about who he would lose, and who would lose him. “Not just that I would lose the people I loved, but they would lose me. And they knew nothing of it. (Did They?) And I, just a skinny kid, the runt of the litter at High Point Farm, would have to pretend not to know what I knew.” Throughout the passage Judd relates many objects in nature to life and the way it slowly fades away. “When dry yellow leaves (like on the birches) don’t fall from a tree the tree is partly dead.” In this quote he’s relating the trees dying to people dying. He realizes that being a young boy he must have had to replace someone else’s young boy who’s no longer a young boy. “Though on a farm living things are dying, dying, dying all the time and many have been names, and others are born taking their places not even knowing that they are taking the places of those who have died” In this quote he’s realizing the circle of life and the way that life and death continues on and