Literary Analysis Of A Parliamentary Affair By Edwina Currie

The text under analysis entitled “Karen” belongs to emotive prose style and to the genre of short story. It is an excerpt from the novel by Edwina Currie “A Parliamentary Affair”. The episode takes place in the house of the main character Karen, a teenage girl. The child is alone at home at Christmas (“School was finished”, “loads of people were flying away for the holiday” and “the heating had switched on automatically”). The story tells the reader about the loneliness of the girl growing up through describing Karen’s family circumstances, her mood and reflection on life.
The abstract contains three types of discourse: description, narrative and interior monologue. However, we more often face mixed types than pure samples of a particular discourse …show more content…
Besides, the author resorts to the use of such a stylistic device as inversion: “Unwillingly her mind turned to her father's continued absences”, “greedily she drank milk”. The adverbial modifiers placed at the beginning of the sentences put an additional stress on the manner of the actions.
Finally we consider the language features characteristic of Karen’s interior dialogue. Her voice sounds completely colloquial with its imprecise and family words (“The other way round, however, was a different matter”, “Why was it all right for Dad to be away”, “It would be nicer with a cat or dog”, “brain-dead”, “silly chat”); with the phrasal verb “to be around” (“Mum was not around”). These features allow us to conclude that we deal here with Karen's interior …show more content…
And on the contrary Karen added negative connotation to the “Elaine’s hurried choices were serviceable and simple” which is in general positive.
There are also cases in the text when it is rather difficult to identify for sure whom the words belong to, Karen or the author. Such as in “The misery in her heart demanded its price” where it is obscure whom this trite metaphor belongs to. Whether Karen sounds dramatically because of self-pity or the author is running out of ideas.
Summing it all up we can say that the text represents a complex mixture of three types of discourse: description, interior monologue and narration. Within each type of discourse different characteristic linguistic means mentioned above take place with the help of which the author is delivering his message of Karen’s deep