Greetings Persistent Writers! Here is my latest analysis: Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut.
As a refresher from my copywork blogpost (click here to read the full post), here is the color coding on the highlights:
- Orange for Action beats
- Green for Descriptions
- No highlights for Dialogue
- Yellow for Summary/Transition
- Blue for Thoughts
- Pink for Authorial/Narrator Intrusion
- Purple for Exposition
The subchapters I copied were very short, and the narrator dominated them, barely showing us any action or movement within the scenes. It gives the impression that the narrator didn’t want to bother with the outside world, so they had kept us close within the abstract realm.
The first subchapter is a soapbox for the narrator, telling us about mankind’s search for meaning, its pursuit outward, “ever outward,” into space. Then the narrator alludes to inwardness, where “goodness and wisdom begins.” We then transition out of the subchapter as the narrator mentions that the following is a true story (which is not).
On the next subchapter, the narrator shows us a crowd gathered at the Rumfoord estate. The narrator listens in on the crowd’s thoughts and interprets their enthusiasm as “a crowd outside the walls of a hanging.”
We transition to some concrete beats. The police tells the crowd that the materialization is happening somewhere else, which prompts the crowd to move away from the estate. The narrator then paints a picture for us of a fat lady and her daughter. The subchapter ends with the lady reprimanding her daughter.
In the next subchapter, the narrator reveals to us that experts had tried to study the materialization, only to be refused by Mrs. Rumfoord. The narrator goes inside the mind of Mrs. Rumfoord who “felt that she owed the world very little” with regards to the materialization.
We transition to concrete beats as we are shown where this report is posted: The report is “in a glass case bolted to the wall next to the one entrance to the estate.” The narrator describes how the entrance looked and how the wide gates were bricked in.
The narrator then reveals what’s in the report, which is scant and spiteful to those who are curious. Finally, we are given the names of the entities that materialize: Winston Rumfoord and his dog, Kazak. It is revealed that Winston can see “the past and future clearly.”
The POV is third-person omniscient as demonstrated by going inside anyone’s mind and revealing their thoughts (the crowd, the fat lady and Mrs. Rumfoord).
The narrator’s tone seems morose and pessimistic. They describe the crowd as “very much like a crowd in a hanging.” They give us a peek of what the crowd thinks, then comments that their thoughts “were made pornographic by the magic lantern slides of morbid imaginations.” Finally, the narrator also commented that “the iron door were uniformly bleak and peevish.” This narrator has a negative outlook, which contrasts with the first subchapter.
Below is a graph of the narrative modes of the copied scene. This shows the rhythm between abstract and concrete beats. It scales from -3 to +3 with the following sequence respectively: Exposition (as -3), Intrusion, Thought, Transition (as 0.5), Description, Dialogue and Action (as +3).
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