Please offer a close analysis of this passage (the opening chapter of Anne Enright's novel The Gathering). Your analysis should explore both the content and the style of the passage - i.e. what is being said and how it is being said. You might also want to consider how this passage works as an opening chapter - what kind of a novel does it lead you to expect?
No knowledge of the rest of the novel is expected or required. Your analysis should be about 1000-1200 words.
The text is as follows:
I WOULD LIKE to write down what happened in my grandmother's house the summer I was eight or nine, but I am not sure if it really did happen_ I need to bear witness to an uncertain event. I feel it roaring inside me — this thing that may not have taken place. I don't even know what name to put on it. I think you might call it a crime of the flesh, but the flesh is long fallen away and I am not sure what hurt may linger in the bones. My brother Liam loved birds and, like all boys, he loved the bones of dead animals. I have no sons myself so when I pass any small skull or skeleton I hesitate and think of him, how he admired their intricacies. A magpie's ancient arms coming through the mess of feathers; stubby and light and clean. That is the word we use about bones: Clean. I tell my daughters to step back, obviously, from the mouse skull in the woodland or the dead finch that is weathering by the garden wall. I am not sure why. Though sometimes we find, on the beach, a cuttlefish bone so pure that I have to slip it in my pocket, and I comfort my hand with the secret white arc of it. You can not libel the dead, I think, you can only console them. So I offer Liam this picture: my two daughters running on the sandy rim of a stony beach, under a slow, turbulent sky, the shoulders of their coats shrugging behind them. Then I erase it. I close my eyes and roll with the sea's loud static. When I open them again, it is to call the girls back to the car. Rebecca! Emily! It does not matter. I do not know the truth, or I do not know how to tell the truth. All I have are stories, night thoughts, the sudden convictions that uncertainty spawns. All I have are ravings, more like. She loved him! I say. She must have loved him! I wait for the kind of sense that dawn makes, when you have not slept. I stay downstairs while the family breathes above me and I write it down, I lay them out in nice sentences, all my clean, white bones.
You'll need to write an analytical essay about this chapter in the book you've been assigned.
Your analysis should explore both the content and the style of the passage -
i.e. what is being said and how it is being said.
You might also want to consider how this passage works as an opening chapter - what kind of a novel does it lead you to expect?
Once you have planned and written your paper, be sure to edit and proofread it carefully, more than twice! Then run your paper throughly https://www.grammarly.com to have it checked.
After all that, including Grammarly, you may post it here if you want someone to critique it for you.