Comparing Paul Theroux's Ghost Train To The Eastern Star

Great Essays
Texts 1 and 2- an extract from a non-fiction piece titled 'Ghost Train to the Eastern Star' by Paul Theroux and a travel blog written by Cristian Bonetto from lonely planet.org entitled 'Singapore'- have in common the subject matter of Singapore. Even though both texts have a common thread of Singapore, the reader is shocked by the contrasting viewpoints that the texts offer on the same city of Singapore. While the audience of both texts is people who are looking for insightful information on Singapore, the purposes vary greatly. Text 1 aims to persuade the reader to not visit Singapore, describing it as a rather dystopian city where "rats are rewarded" (line 20). On the other hand, text 2 aims to persuade readers to visit Singapore, describing …show more content…
While text 1 uses short sentence structure induced with parallelism, text 2 uses a long and varying sentence structure. Theroux while describing the population, uses parallel sentences since “No one was fat. No one was poor. No one was badly dressed” (line 8). When the reader reads this out loud, it sounds robotic and mechanic, written without any emotions which is the effect that Theroux aimed to achieve. By doing so, the author convinces his reader that everyone, like the robotic tone, was the same in Singapore and there was no distinction due to the oppressive nature and the manipulation of the government. Furthermore, the reader has already experienced this robotically similar population of Singapore when the female population was described to length with adjectives like “soft” (line 4), pale (line 4), and vulpine (line 5). This description is similar to that of a stereotypical ideal woman who never chides and is fair. This offers the reader a glimpse into the minds of the Singaporeans (they might also have the same brains since all of them possess “frustrated intelligence (line 6)) and how they still believe in stereotypes. Meanwhile the sentence structure in text 2 is varying and lengthy to create a beautiful and vivid image of the city to represent the variety of things offered in

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