The Beginning
In an article on novel beginnings, the novelist Blake Morrison writes:
‘Gabriel Garcia Marquez has said that he sometimes spends months on a first paragraph, since it’s there that the theme, style and tone of a book are defined – solve that and the rest comes easily.’
In In pairs, talk about how far the opening paragraph of The Road (from ‘When he woke in the woods in the dark’ to ‘loped soundlessly into the dark.’) defines the novel it introduces.
The Opening Section – a Homework Task
1. On your own, re-read the first 28 pages, pulling out anything you think is a key feature of the novel, for example aspects of sentence structure, imagery, the handling of narrative and chronological time, the pattern of a conversation and so on.
Key features of pages 1-28
|
Example
|
2. Choose two or three of these features that you think are developed interestingly throughout the rest of the novel. Explore the ways in which McCarthy uses the particular feature and the significance it takes on.
No comments:
Post a Comment