Parentheses & Perspectives

I have really been enjoying reading Carrie by Stephen King. The storyline is very intriguing and leaves me wanting more whenever I have to put my book down. King also uses some interesting elements that enhance the story. For example, he uses parentheses to express characters’ thoughts, “She swung her whole arm into the blow, and the sound of her palm against Carrie’s face (o god i am so afraid now) was like that flat sound of a leather belt being snapped in air” (King 113). This helps the reader to further understand what the characters, or in this case, Carrie, are thinking and feeling. Because of this, I would like to focus on the point of view of the story for my literary analysis paper. Even though the book is written in third person point of view, the way King organizes everything makes it much more exciting than just a plain third person narrative. He is able to incorporate multiple characters’ thoughts and feelings through the use of different letters and articles, which, despite the fact that they are all separate and come from different sources, flow together and help the story along.

As I have said before, I love the format of Carrie. I really admire how King is able to create all these “articles”, “letters”, and “interviews” and combine them to create a logical and convincing story. One example that really blew my mind is an article about how telekinesis may be inherited, “It is now generally agreed that the TK phenomenon is a genetic-recessive occurrence–but the opposite of a disease like hemophilia, which becomes overt only in males” (King 120). He follows this with a “speculation” of how Carrie may have inherited telekinesis. As of today, telekinesis has not been proven to exist, so clearly King had to come up with an explanation of the science behind it, proving to the world just how creative he is.

2 thoughts on “Parentheses & Perspectives

  1. I agree that the parentheses help the reader understand the character’s thoughts. It’s a unique and interesting element to the book that Stephen King adds and I love how it benefits my understanding of the book. This is a really good rhetorical device to analyze because it offers a lot of interpreting as to why King implemented it into the story. Does King give Carrie these “idea bubbles” because she has no way of expressing herself in the real world? That’s the approach I would take in the analysis because of the many conclusions you can draw on the basis of that question.

  2. I’m so glad you are enjoying your reading so far. It sounds like you may be focusing, so far at this point, on King’s use of unexplained phenomena. What effect is he reaching for in using things such as telekinesis? And why do you think he’s revealing character traits through those letters and articles? The reader is forced to piece clues together to ??

    It will be interesting to see what you end up focusing on once you finish. King is a phenomenal writer of our time … I wonder if you’ll want to read more of his work when we are done?

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