Text 32- More Pricks than Kicks

Text 32- More Pricks than Kicks

1. Contexts of production

   • Purpose is to entertain, a story of how a fictional irish man, Belaqua, prepares his food for a journey
   • Short story from a collection in 1934
   • Uses vocabulary from a military background, suggests how making toast is like going into battle
   • Very specifi, personal methods, suggest only he knows what wartime life is like

2. Form and Structure

   • Long detailed sentences throughout, tells us that the text is aimed at a higher, more educated audience
   • Colloquial language reflecting a conversational tone
   • From third person, omnicient narrator, however we can still feel a strong sense of personal opnion from the protagonist
   • Rhetorical questions used to let the audience question the situation
   • Four main paragraphs, tells us of the novel genre

3. Word Choice and Sound patterning

   • Serio Comical lexis used to increase the drama of the situation, makes it a lot more inviting to read and is ironically written, as it is very simple to make burnt toast
   • Uses conventional words from heroic poetry but applies it to ordinary situations such as words like assasin and victory
   • From the semantic field of wartime creates and emotive response from the reader such as 'abominated' 'back to prison' 'comrade' and 'barrel' creates dangerous imagery. Also highilighted by the figurative language of 'rapture' and 'victory', describes how desparate his is for the food and how precious it is to him
   • Uses words from the semantic field of religion
   • 'flabby slab plump down on glowing fabric' onomatopoeia uses assonanse as it repeats the vowel sound
   • Onomatopoeia also used as the author describes him eating toast 'snap' 'gnash' these descriptive words make him seem almost animalistic, which could suggest how people at wartime destroy eachother much like animals do to fight to be alive
   • Very sepcific lexis, shows taht he thinks everyone else is wrong

4. Audience is fans of Beckett's work and literary short stories