An Occurrence at Owl Creek Station

A man stood upon a railroad bridge in Northern Alabama, looking down into the swift waters twenty feet below. The man’s hands were behind his back, the wrists bound with a cord. A rope loosely encircled his neck. It was attached to a stout cross-timber  above his head, and the slack  fell to the level of his knees. Some loose boards laid upon the sleepers  supporting the metals of the railway supplied a footing for him and his executioners – two private soldiers of the Federal army, directed by a sergeant, who in civil life may have been a deputy sheriff. At a short remove  upon the same temporary platform was an officer in the uniform of his rank armed. He was a captain. <…>

Beyond one of the sentinels nobody was in sight the railroad ran straight away into a forest for a hundred yards, then curving, was lost to view. Doubtless there was an outpost farther along. The other bank of the stream was open ground – a gentle acclivity crowned with a stockade of vertical tree trunks, loop-holed for rifles, with a single embrasure through which protruded the muzzle of a brass cannon commanding the bridge.

 

DETAILED COMPREHENSION

1. DEFINE the quantitative correlation of definite and indefinite articles in the first and the second texts. Make the conclusion about the subjectivity or objectivity of the narration in both cases.

2. ANSWER if we can we say that the definite articles used in the first text bear the expressive function, or they are used accordingly to the grammatical rules.

3. SAY what objects, persons, phenomena are pointed out with the help of the indefinite article. Are they important for the described scene?

RUDYARD KIPLING

The Story of Muhammad Din

"Who is the happy man? He that sees in his own house at home, little children crowned with dust, leaping and falling and crying. "

  Munichandra

 

THE polo-ball was an old one, scarred, chipped, and dinted. It stood on the mantelpiece among the pipe-stems which Imam Din, khitmatgar, was cleaning for me.

‘Does the Heaven-born want this ball?’ said Imam Din, deferentially.

The Heaven-born set no particular store by it; but of what use was a polo-ball to a khigmatar?

‘By Your Honour’s favour, I have a little son. He has seen this ball, and desires it to play with. I do not want it for myself.’

 No one would for an instant accuse portly old Imam Din of wanting to play with polo-balls. He carried out the battered thing into the verandah; and there followed a hurricane of joyful squeaks, a patter of small feet, and the thud-thud-thud of the ball rolling along the ground. Evidently the little son had been waiting outside the door to secure his treasure. But how had he managed to see that polo-ball?

Next day, coming back from office half an hour earlier than usual, I was aware of a small figure in the dining-room – a tiny, plump figure in a ridiculously inadequate shirt, which came, perhaps, halfway down the tubby stomach. It wandered round the room, thumb in mouth, crooning to itself as it took stock of the pictures. Undoubtedly this was the ‘little son.’

He had no business in my room, of course; but was so deeply absorbed in his discoveries that he never noticed me in the doorway. I stepped into the room and startled him nearly into a fit. He sat down on the ground with a gasp. His eyes opened, and his mouth followed suit. I knew what was coming, and fled, followed by a long, dry howl which reached the servants’ quarters far more quickly than any command of mine had ever done. In ten seconds Imam Din was in the dining-room. Then despairing sobs arose, and I returned to find Imam Din admonishing the small sinner, who was using most of his shirt as a handkerchief.

‘This boy,’ said Imam Din, judicially, ‘is a budmash – a big budmash. He will, without doubt, go to the jail-khana for his behaviour.’ Renewed yells from the penitent and an elaborate apology to myself from Imam Din.

‘Tell the baby,’ I said, ‘that the Sahib is not angry, and take him away.’ Imam Din conveyed my forgiveness to the offender, who had now gathered all his shirt round his neck, stringwise, and the yell subsided into a sob. The two set off for the door. ‘His name,’ said Imam Din, as though the name were part of the crime, ‘is Muhammad Din, and he is a budmash.’ Freed from present danger, Muhammad Din turned round in his father’s arms, and said gravely, ‘It is true that my name is Muhammad Din, Tahib, but I am not a budmash. I am a man.

From that day dated my acquaintance with Muhammad Din. Never again did he come into my dining-room, but on the neutral ground of the compound, we greeted each other with much state, though our conversation was confined to ‘Talaam Tahib’ from his side, and ‘Salaam, Muhammad Din’ from mine. Daily on my return from office, the little white shirt and the fat little body used to rise from the shade of the creeper-covered trellis where they had been hid; and daily I checked my horse here, that my salutation might not be slurred over or given unseemly.

Muhammad Din never had any companions. He used to trot about the compound, in and out of the castor-oil bushes, on mysterious errands of his own. One day I stumbled upon some of his handiwork far down the grounds. He had half buried the polo-ball in dust, and stuck six shrivelled old marigold flowers in a circle round it. Outside that circle again was a rude square, traced out in bits of red brick alternating with fragments of broken china; the whole bounded by a little bank of dust. The water-man from the well-curb put in a plea, for the small architect, saying that it was only the play of a baby and did not much disfigure my garden.

Heaven knows that I had no intention of touching the child’s work then or later; but, that evening, a stroll through the garden brought me unawares full on it; so that I trampled, before I knew, marigold-heads, dust-bank, and fragments of broken soap-dish into confusion past all hope of mending. Next morning, I came upon Muhammad Din crying softly to himself over the ruin I had wrought. Someone had cruelly told him that the Sahib was very angry with him for spoiling the garden, and had scattered his rubbish, using bad language the while. Muhammad Din laboured for an hour at effacing every trace of the dust-bank and pottery fragments, and it was with a tearful and apologetic face that he said, ‘Talaam Tahib,’ when I came home from office.

A hasty inquiry resulted in Imam Din informing Muhammad Din that, by my singular favour, he was permitted to disport himself as he pleased. Whereat the child took heart and fell to tracing the ground-plan of an edifice which was to eclipse the marigold-polo-ball creation.

For some months, the chubby little eccentricity revolved in his humble orbit among the castor-oil bushes and in the dust; always fashioning magnificent palaces from stale flowers thrown away by the bearer, smooth water-worn pebbles, bits of broken glass, and feathers pulled, I fancy, from my fowls – always alone, and always crooning to himself.

A gaily spotted sea-shell was dropped one day close to the last of his little buildings; and I looked that Muhammad Din should build something more than ordinarily splendid on the strength of it. Nor was I disappointed. He meditated for the better part of an hour, and his crooning rose to a jubiliant song. Then he began tracing in the dust. It would certainly be a wondrous palace, this one, for it was two yards long and a yard broad in groundplan. But the palace was never completed.

Next day there was no Muhammad Din at the head of the carriage-drive and no ‘Talaam Tahib’ to welcome my return. I had grown accustomed to the greeting, and its omission troubled me. Next day Imam Din told me that the child was suffering slightly from fever and needed quinine. He got the medicine, and an English Doctor.

‘They have no stamina, these brats,’ said the Doctor, as he left Imam Din’s quarters.

A week later, though I would have given much to have avoided it, I met on the road to the Mussulman burying-ground Imam Din, accompanied by one other friend, carrying in his arms, wrapped in a white cloth, all that was left of little Muhammad Din.

REFERENCE

1. Пелевина, Н.Ф. Стилистический анализ художественного текст; [Текст] / Н.Ф.Пелевина. – Л.: Просвещение, 1980. – С. 116-128.

FIGURES OF SPEECH

GENERAL COMPREHENSION

BE READY TO SPEAK ON:

1. Y. Skrebnev’s classification of Figures of Speech.

2. Figures of replacement.

· Figures of quantity (hyperbole, meiosis).

· Figures of quality (metonymy, metaphor, irony).

3. Metonymy and its variations.

4. Metaphor and its types.

5. Figures of co-occurrence.

· Figures of Identity (simile, quasi-identity, synonymous replacement).

· Figures of Inequality (specifying synonyms, climax (gradation), anti-climax (bathos), pun, zeugma, tautology).

· Figures of Contrast (oxymoron, antithesis).

 

DETAILED COMPREHENSION

 

1. GIVE the DEFINITION of the terms “figures of speech”, “tropes.” Say, if these terms are used identically?

2. DO the exercises:

 

Ex.1. Compare hyperbole and understatement:

1. “It must have been that caviar,” he was thinking. “That beastly caviar.” He violently hated caviar. Every surgeon in the Black Sea was his personal enemy (Huxley).

2. Calpurnia was all angles and bones; her hand was as wide as a bed slat and twice as hard (Lee).

3. This boy, headstrong, willful, and disorderly as he is, should not have one penny of my money, or one crust of my bread, or one grasp of my hand, to save him from the loftiest gallows in all Europe (Dickens).

4. They were under a great shadowy train shed… with passenger cars all about and the train moving at a snail pace (Dreiser).

5. Her eyes were open, but only just. “Don’t move the tiniest part of an inch” (Salinger).

6. The little woman, for she was of pocket size, crossed her hands solemnly on her middle (Galsworthy).

Ex.2. State the type of relations between the object named and the object implied in the following examples of metonymy:

1. She saw around her, clustered about the white tables, multitude of violently red lips, powdered cheeks, cold, hard eyes, self-possessed arrogant faces, and insolent bosoms (Bennett).

2. It must not be supposed that stout women of a certain age never seek to seduce the eye and trouble the meditations of man by other than moral charms (Bennett).

3. For several days he took an hour after his work to make inquiry taking with him some examples of his pen and inks (Dreiser).

4. The praise… was enthusiastic enough to have delighted any common writer who earns his living by his pen… (Maugham).

5. He was interested in everybody. His mind was alert, and people asked him to dinner not for old times’ sake, but because he was worth his salt (Maugham).

 

Ex.3. Specify the type of transfer of meaning used to create the following figures of quality. State the type of each figure:

1. It being his habit not to jump or leap, or make an upward spring, at anything in life, but to crawl at every thing (Dickens).

2. The Face of London was now strangely altered… the voice of Mourning was heard in every street (Defoe).

3. Then would come six or seven good years when there might be 20 or 25 inches of rain, and the land would shout with grass (Steinbeck).

4. Stoney smiled the sweet smile of an alligator (Steinbeck).

5. I have only one good quality – overwhelming belief in the brains and hearts of our nation, our state, our town (Lewis).

6. At the great doors of the church, through the shady paths of the Plaza, visible and vanishing again at the mouths of dark streets, the silent, sinister figures of black-robed women gathered to wash away her sins (Reed).

7. He made his way through the perfume and conversation (B.Shaw).

8. England has two eyes, Oxford and Cambridge. They are the two eyes of England, and two intellectual eyes (Taylor).

9. Mother Nature always blushes before disrobing (Esar).

10. The pennies were saved by bulldozing the grocer (O’Henry).

11. Forty years he had wielded the brush without getting near enough to touch the hem of his Mistress’s robe (O’Henry).

12. The cold breath of autumn had stricken its leaves from the vine until its skeleton branches clung, almost bare, to the crumbling backs (O’Henry).

 

REFERENCES

1. Арнольд, И.В. Стилистика. Современный английский язык [Текст ]: учеб. для вузов / И.В. Арнольд. – М.: Флинта: Наука, 2004. – C. 275–295.

2. Skrebnev, Y.M. Fundamentals of English Stylistics [Text] / Y.M. Skrebnev.
– M., 1994.