Linguistic Language Analysis Theme and Metaphor
To demonstrate the workings of linguistic language analysis is the aim of this paper. In line with this, two texts have been chosen for analysis and they are James Joyce s short story Araby and Sylvia Plath s poem Daddy .
Araby is a part of the collection of short stories called Dubliners published in 1914 written by the Irish author James Joyce. Araby is a story that centers on a boy on the cusp of sexual awakening. It starts with a telling look at the inhabitants of North Richmond Street, and the boys of the Christian Brothers School located on it, before it focuses on the nameless main character and his romantic feelings towards his neighbor, an also nameless, older girl, who also happens to be the sister of his friend, Mangan. It later culminates in an anticlimactic yet poignant setting, in the place called Araby, where the young boy gets his first taste of harsh reality that seems to break the fragility of his innocence. Although not a lengthy piece, the story is a multi-layered literary fabric that tackles different themes at the same time. For this paper, only an excerpt of the story is focused on, and the particular excerpt starts from the fifth to the sixth paragraph, centering mainly on the boy s unique description of the emotions he feels for Mangan s sister.
Daddy , on the other hand, is a poem written by American author Sylvia Plath in 1962. It is included in two compilations of the author s works, namely Ariel and The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath, both published posthumously ( Plath, Sylvia, c1995, p. 588). Sylvia Plath s works have been made arguably more famous by the events that unfolded in her life, most especially by her untimely death in 1963 because of suicide. One can say that Plath s poetry often carries tinges of truth from her life, and an example of this is Daddy, which is said to dramatize the hate and love a young woman feels for her father, who died when she was only ten ( Plath, Sylvia, 1995, p. 588). Unlike Araby which seeks to play with different yet somehow interdependent themes, Daddy basically revolves on the image of the father figure as compared to the image of Nazi Germany. Since the poem is only a little over 500 words, its entirety is included in the analysis.
These two pieces are chosen mainly because they exhibit two aspects of language description quite strongly and these aspects are metaphor and theme. In both works, the two evidently complement each other the consistency of the metaphors has enabled the construction of a strong and recognizable theme that enables the readers to fully engage in the texts.
Theme and Metaphor
Theme and metaphor are the two chosen aspects for analysis simply because they are two of the most analyzed features of a literary text. Although beginners might find a theme hard to spot and metaphors difficult to comprehend, the practice of being able to recognize these two and how they contribute to the understanding of a certain literary work is both important and advantageous, especially to students who aim to take their study of literature to a higher level.
Themes are underlying concepts that mesh the work together. According to Learner.Org, a teacher resource website by Annenberg Media (n.d.), in fiction, the theme is not intended to teach or preach. In fact, it is not presented directly at all. You extract it from the characters, action, and setting that make up the story. In other words, you must figure out the theme yourself (para. 3). As mentioned, the difficulty of analyzing theme lies in its veiled nature. Because of this, students, ordinary readers, and literary critics alike sometimes find themselves disagreeing on what the theme of a particular work is. On the contrary, the lack of blatancy pushes the reader to dissect a text more, and hence encourages a more up-close and intellectual engagement of it that will perhaps bring more out of the text than what has been seen before. Noel Reyes (n.d.) says of the various elements of fiction, theme is probably the most difficult to discuss A theme is the understanding that the author seeks to communicate through the work. It gives the work its purpose and has a great deal to do with the way the whole is constructed (para. 1-2). Reyes differentiates theme from message by saying that the theme is the general subject (n.d., para. 2). Theme is at once the beginning and end of our search. The search itself is what gives value to our engagement with literature (n.d., para. 2). Since it is important to establish a theme in a literary piece, analysis usually exposes how certain events in the work are patterned to achieve that goal. It can come in the form of reiterated points, or, as in the case of this paper, related metaphors. Later on, this patterning will be demonstrated in the analysis of the two texts, especially in Plath s Daddy , where the related metaphors help converge the work s elements into a singular theme. Like what has been mentioned earlier, the theme in this case serves as a conceptual backbone of the work, without which the entire piece will not be able to stand.
Meanwhile, metaphor is ordinarily known as the expression of an understanding of one concept in terms of another concept, where there is some similarity or correlation between the two ( What is, 2004, Definition, 1). Metaphor is for most people a device of the poetic imagination and the rhetorical flourish a matter of extraordinary rather than ordinary language (Lakoff and Johnson, 2003, p. 3). According to I.A. Richards (1936), metaphors have two parts, namely the tenor (or subject) and the vehicle (as cited in Su, 1994, 134). The tenor is the object that borrows a trait from the vehicle. Soon Peng Su (1994) cites an example love is a rose wherein it is explicit that the literal senses of the two entities compared are incongruous (p. 134). Su (1994) says that in order to make sense of metaphor, there occurs a shift from the literal to the figurative meaning (p. 134).
Shruti Chandra Gupta (2007) lists 18 types of metaphors in her article. There is the absolute metaphor in which the metaphor does not make sense (Gupta, 2007, 4). An example is She broke upon a sad piece (Gupta, 2007, 4). There is the implied metaphor, an indirect metaphor where an implication to the whole is made (Gupta, 2007, 5). The saying Shut your trap is an example of an implied metaphor (Gupta, 2007, 5). There is also the synechdochesynechdochic metaphor where a part of the association is used instead of the object with the example Her feet flapped like terrified wings (Gupta, 2007, 8). There is the conceptual metaphor that has many metaphoric meanings in them. Their underlying meaning creates a novel thought or a universal concept , such as Life is a journey (Gupta, 2007, 13). Last is the compound or loose metaphor, which is made of more than one similarity. In it, the writer extends a metaphor by using more than one association (Gupta, 2007, 17). One example is The air smelt of fear, the fear of abandonment (Gupta, 2007, 17). Some of these are made use of in both Araby and Daddy , as will be seen in the following section.
Metaphor has been used since the ancient times, and until now, making them deeply embedded in our culture. The Greek writers have also employed metaphors in their writings, most probably for the obvious reason that metaphors allow speakers to describe things in a way that simple, literal explanation will not be enough for. Metaphors not only enable the speaker or writer to express himself or herself to the fullest but also creates an imaginative account of reality that transforms everyday language into some form of art. Roman Jakobson once said that literature is organized violence committed on ordinary speech, and perhaps this can be aptly applied to the effect of metaphors on literary works.
As mentioned in the previous section and earlier in this one, theme and metaphor are chosen as points of analysis for the two texts because they are two of the most common features that students are asked to examine when they deal with literary texts. Another reason is that these two aspects of language description are suitable for Araby and Daddy because both works are filled with metaphors that follow a certain pattern, which in turn creates a solid imagery that underlines the main themes of the pieces. In the following section, one can see how the metaphors are linked together to unify the works and at the same time, enhance the artistic quality and clarity of the selected texts.
Analysis of the Texts
The fifth and sixth paragraphs of Araby are chosen for analysis because it is in these parts that related metaphors are most condensed. The metaphors found in these paragraphs are all linked to religious practices, and thus strengthens one of the themes of the short story. Although there are smatterings of religion-related terms in the first part of the story, it is in these paragraphs that metaphors are heavily used to convey the character and emotions of the young boy.
The fifth paragraph of Araby centers on the chaotic scene of the marketplace, where the boy, accompanying his aunt, draws up a churchly description of his surroundings. Right off the bat, Joyce (1914) paints a stark comparison of two venues (the church and the market) that are ordinarily seen as different. The first sentence foreshadows this unlikely comparison by starting with Her image accompanied me even in places the most hostile to romance. Then, the author makes use of antithesis by using the word curses in the sentence with litanies in this passage We walked through the flaring streets, jostled by drunken men and bargaining women, amid the curses of labourers, the shrill litanies of shop-boys who stood on guard by the barrels of pigs cheeks. And although the noises created by the market people are nowhere near the melodious voices of a church choir, the persona narrates how he imagines himself as someone who bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes, wherein the chalice he speaks of stands for his adoration for the nameless young woman, and the foes are the jostling crowd around him. Then, the author follows this up with other religion-related metaphors, such as the comparison of the girl s name (which is never out rightly mentioned) to strange prayers and praises that even the persona cannot understand, and the likening of the boy s body to a harp, an instrument usually associated with angels, which the girl s fingers nimbly play.
The sixth paragraph continues this imagery. First, although not in the context of a metaphor, the persona is described as going to the drawing room of the dead priest. Here, the room is seen as, literally, a church for the boy because the drawing room is where he prays All my senses seemed to desire to veil themselves and, feeling that I was about to slip from them, I pressed the palms of my hands together until they trembled, murmuring O love O love many times. His gestures are exactly like that of someone in the middle of prayer, with his hands together and his mouth mumbling repetitive phrases that is common to Catholic prayers. One can then deduce that the drawing room is an implied metaphor, since it is not overtly likened to a church, but merely associated with the dead priest and then combined with the boy s actions while inside the location.
According to an interpretation of the story by A.R. Coulthard (1994), one of the main themes pervading in the piece has something to do with religion or the church, particularly its oppressiveness (Coulthard, 1994, para. 3). Right from the beginning of the story, elements such as the Christian school, the dead priest s drawing room, the books in that room, and even the lines and characterizations of some of the supporting characters seem to highlight the influential position of religion on the persona s life. Coulthard (1994) says that it might be because of Joyce s own upbringing in Dublin, Ireland, even calling it the chastising Dublin air (para. 6). But regardless of how one might interpret it, the abundance of religious metaphors in the short story (mainly in the fifth and sixth paragraphs) is testament to the underlying theme closely linked to religion. If connected to the supposed main theme of initiation recounting a young romantics first bitter taste of reality (Coulthard, 1994, para. 1), the theme of religion losing its hold on a person on the verge of maturity can be neatly tied to this. The once fanatical young boy who sees his object of affection as something akin to holy (as seen in the fifth and sixth paragraphs), ends up with a rude awakening gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity and my eyes burned with anguish and anger (Joyce, 1914, last paragraph).
Very much like Araby, Sylvia Plath s Daddy makes use of connecting metaphors to establish the theme of the poem. For most of the poem, the pervading metaphor was related to the Holocaust, particularly the inhuman treatment of the Jews by the Germans. The persona looks at herself as a Jew, and the father figure as a German (Hitler, to be more specific). In Daddy , the father figure (or figures) and the images of Nazi Germany are inextricably linked, with the latter serving almost as a mold for the former. Using I.A. Richards (1964) parts of the metaphor, the father figure fills the role of the tenor, while Nazi Germany is the vehicle. Consequentially, one can consider the poem as one huge extended metaphor Nazi Germany being the principal subject and the rest (with terms such as Gobbledygoo, Luftwaffe, Aryan, and Mein Kampf) as subsidiary subjects.
The poem begins with the metaphor of the father as a shoe where the persona had lived like a foot (Plath, 1981, p. 222). Here, the shoe can be considered to represent the domineering presence of the father, boxing the persona in completely. The shoe here can also be interpreted along the lines of the popular expression to live in hisher shoes , which means that a person followed the same path that the one before himher trod. The second stanza then starts with a parallel between the persona and the author, with both their fathers passing away early in their lives. In this stanza, another image of the father is constructed that of a god. This theme continues in the poem, intertwined with the Nazi concept and Hitler s fascism. Daddy as a god is kept in the third stanza by continuing the elaboration on the metaphorical size of the father Ghastly statue with one gray toe Big as a Frisco seal And a head in the freakish Atlantic. This adds to the seemingly consuming presence painted by the persona about her father.
From the fourth stanza onward, Nazi images abound. First, the mention of a Polish town scraped flat by the roller Of wars, wars, wars. (Plath, 1981, p. 222), pertaining to the vicious attack of the Nazi towards Poles and other European minorities during the height of the Holocaust. The Jew-German relationship of the persona and her father is then explicitly stated in this part of the poem
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene
An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew. (Plath, 1981, p. 223)
The persona furthers her comparison of herself and the Holocaust victims with a mention of another minority group that were caught in Hitler s anti-Jew campaign With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack (Plath, 1981, p. 223). Here, the author makes use of the connotations of taroctarot cards to associate it with the stereotypical image of Gypsies as fortune-tellers.
The ninth stanza strengthens the built Nazi image of the father with more mention of German terms. In this stanza alone, four German-related terms were mentioned Luftwaffe (an aircraft), gobbledygoo (or gobbledygook, slang term for gibberish, probably pertaining to German), Aryan (a mythical race that Hitler believed are the ancestors of Germans), and Panzer (a German tank).
In the next stanza, two more German-related terms are mentioned swastika and Fascist. Swastika is the feared symbol of the Nazi movement, while there is the image of the Fascist that Every woman adores , hinting at not only the mental hold of the father figure on the persona, but also a physical one The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you (Plath, 1981, p. 223). Another Hitler allusion is seen in this part, with the mention of Mein Kampf, Hitler s controversial book ( Mein Kampf, 1995, p. 326)
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look
And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do. (Plath, 1981, 224)
This stanza gives an insight on the persona s strange obsession with her father, with her willingly marrying a man who resembled her father and his sadism.
The rest of the poem then continues to portray the father as a villain, but since they no longer concentrate on the metaphor of the Holocaust, they will not be discussed here. What is important is that the analysis clearly shows the effect of the related metaphors on the building of the underlying theme, the most common being the German-Jew relationship.
Aspects of Language Description and Its Advantages in Classroom Practice
As mentioned in the earlier parts of the paper, theme and metaphor are hardly the easiest aspects of language description that can be tackled, but oddly enough, they are the ones most discussed in a literature classroom. Although faced with difficulties regarding these topics, the English teacher is also presented with advantages in this situation.
For one, metaphors in a language are not merely linguistic devices thought up on a whim by speakers. Metaphors are pieces of culture in themselves, much like idiomatic expressions. Learning to understand them and how they work in literary and non-literary environments also improve the student s proficiency in the language. It is undoubtedly hard to lecture on the nuances of cultural practices, especially when linked to language practice, but through the introduction of metaphors via the medium of the written word (i.e. literature), the students are automatically exposed to the inner workings of a certain people s society, tradition, and even history. Hence, their knowledge is not merely limited to technicalities, such as grammar rules. They are able to expand their knowledge to the level of communicative competence because they are able to understand even concealed meanings in utterances, phrases, or sentences. By studying literature abundant in metaphors, the English teacher is not only making the student well-versed in the area of literary art, but also enables the student to open up to experiences and views quite unlike his or her own. Apart from that, constant exposure to metaphors and close scrutiny of their effects as literary devices also develop the student s imaginative abilities. Since English is known to be one of the most (if not the most) dynamic and innovative languages in the world, it is not impossible for the student to contribute to the wealth of metaphors or literary devices in the language by making up his or her own. Apart from allowing the student to freely express his or her thoughts, this type of practice also makes him or her aware of the fast pace of evolution that the language is still undertaking, and further prepares him or her to cope with it as an active speaker.
As for the topic of theme, it is important to be able to teach the student to be sensitive to the fine details of a literary work. As an English teacher, one must be able to make the student appreciate all the things beyond the page and in between the lines. The theme should not necessarily be something that is set in stone. Unlike metaphors that can have limited interpretations, themes are always the subject of intellectual discussions and hence, can improve the student s ability to judge for himself or herself the real purpose behind every piece of literary work. Be it something as easy as a fable, or something more complex like a Faulkner novel, being able to figure out the theme is, as Noel Reyes (n.d.) said, both the means and the end. Understanding what a theme is and what it is for ultimately trains the student to carefully examine every text before judging it.
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