17 2014

to reference the taboo of forbidden actions and the illegality of Charlie Stowe’s ‘crime’ as he ‘tiptoed’ down the stairs with heightened ‘caution’. By using words weighted with connotations of stasis and quietness, Greene manages to render a mimetic response in the mind of the reader: they have to remain quiet and hushed while following the story. My aim with the use of the semantic field was much the same – I too wanted to induce emotions via the use of a ‘reader response’ technique to try and make the story something that is experienced rather than just read. I was inspired to use the unreliable narrator device by Haruki Murakami after seeing it implemented in his story ‘The Kangaroo Communiqué’. Murakami wrote the monologue that forms the ‘The Kangaroo Communiqué’ riddled with contradictions and jarring changes of tone,unsettling anecdotes and aporia (‘Actually, I’m extremely dissatisfied with being who I am’) that contribute to conveying the confusion and implied mental instability of the narrator. I used the device to reflect how my narrator was under the influence of alcohol: ‘A beer, or three, had vanished. Stumbling. Oyster Card swipes and tube trains. A bottle of Jack Daniels had disappeared.’The inability to remember his night in full is shown by ‘or three’ which highlights an unreliability as well as an unbalanced mental state. In ‘The Enormous Radio’, John Cheever uses objective correlative to embed the emotion of terror felt by Irene Westcott towards the new radio by turning the elevator shaft in the building into a ‘rattling’, ‘whirring’ force with ‘opening and closing’ doors like an evil jaw. I implemented objective correlative to reflect my characters drunkenness: ‘…the club orbited around me again before the drink was gone’ (here the club is said to ‘orbit’, embedding the feelings of physical instability into the building) and his loneliness through the description of the stars above London: ‘the naked silver stars were visible above London’s streets, isolated from one another and separated by millions of

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