Hunter saves some of her most memorable run-ons for the end of Dishes. In this example we have the nouns, adjectives, and verbs one after the other. They are even more clustered together because the writer chooses to get rid of punctuation in some instances. Page 29 reads, I ask the cashier to wait while I run to the dairy aisle, I am craving cottage cheese now, I get the biggest tub there is, large curd, I laugh to myself, I laugh and laugh, big girls gotta eat.” It is apparent to me what Hunter is trying to do with this run-on. This time she is using similar adjectives so we feel overwhelmed by the same image that the protagonist does. And the overall image can be a little ambiguous, but we know the image is large because of these words:
…show more content…
The ending reads, “I pass tacos pizzas chicken ice cream barbecue. The sky is pink meatblood, is a runny sorbet, the sun is a melting butterscotch, the sky is a dirty plate” (29). The ending sentences are a lot to swallow and Hunter’s metaphor is not only curious but beautiful. What comes before is important, however. We have a clump of nouns-- pizza, chicken, ice cream, and barbecue-- all without commas separating the items. This is meant to show us the extreme state our protagonist is in. She is driving home, passing this food. We know it’s imagined and so does the protagonist in her hyper state of mind. And this is how she conveys to readers that she is overwhelmed-- by a run-on sentence that excludes proper grammar. It makes sense too, when someone is as consumed as our protagonist is here, they do not take time to say or do things correctly. They tell us what they are thinking, leaving readers to fill in the punctuation if they please. The ending run-on uses the vivid adjectives that we are familiar with in Hunter’s work. Except these adjectives are more unusual than the past and they make us work a little harder to visualize what the main character does. I love this idea as well because Hunter could have ended with images similar to her description of the lipglosses or the disco party. But here we have a pink meatblood sky, a runny sorbet sky, a melting
The ending reads, “I pass tacos pizzas chicken ice cream barbecue. The sky is pink meatblood, is a runny sorbet, the sun is a melting butterscotch, the sky is a dirty plate” (29). The ending sentences are a lot to swallow and Hunter’s metaphor is not only curious but beautiful. What comes before is important, however. We have a clump of nouns-- pizza, chicken, ice cream, and barbecue-- all without commas separating the items. This is meant to show us the extreme state our protagonist is in. She is driving home, passing this food. We know it’s imagined and so does the protagonist in her hyper state of mind. And this is how she conveys to readers that she is overwhelmed-- by a run-on sentence that excludes proper grammar. It makes sense too, when someone is as consumed as our protagonist is here, they do not take time to say or do things correctly. They tell us what they are thinking, leaving readers to fill in the punctuation if they please. The ending run-on uses the vivid adjectives that we are familiar with in Hunter’s work. Except these adjectives are more unusual than the past and they make us work a little harder to visualize what the main character does. I love this idea as well because Hunter could have ended with images similar to her description of the lipglosses or the disco party. But here we have a pink meatblood sky, a runny sorbet sky, a melting