The analysis of Americans and the land from the perspective of
stylistics
This essay mainly talks about the fact that Americans who treat the nature without responsibility and mercy just like their early settlers. The author John Steinbeck, who is one of the winners of the Nobel Prize for literature, described how people pillaged the country vividly from different perspectives. He tries to express the idea that human should live with nature harmoniously.
This paper is going to do the stylistic analysis from the aspects of vocabulary, syntax and the context.
In terms of vocabulary, there exists an intimate relationship between vocabulary and stylistics. Jonathan swift defined stylistics as ”putting proper words in proper order”. Different words have different emotive tendency. In this essay, the author uses the pronoun “they”–meaning the Americans, six times, expressing his dissatisfaction of everything their ancestors have done to the continent. In the second paragraph, the word “our” is used nine times, functioning in the following two aspects. The first is to state his sorrow for the environment we has to live with has been severely polluted. The repeatedly presentation of the word empathized the effect. The second is to satirize the pillagers’ arrogancy and ignorance. These two pronouns well conveyed the idea that man should not conquer and change the environment but maintain the balance of the eco-system. He also uses the figure of personification for example ”Then the plows went in and ripped off the protection water and slow drought and the mischievous wind that roamed through the Great Central Plains.”
Sentences are the basic units of language, which have different structures. In the first paragraph, the author used parallelism to strengthen the tone and ellipsis which briefly and intensely expressed the author’s idea. The combination of parallelism and ellipsis such as “They burned “successfully exhibits how fast people destruct the environment. The figure of simile has also been used for example “they come as though” and “… as though they held”. The American treat the country as a quarry not
their home.
As to the context, the author write according to time sequence. The phrases like”after a time”and “for a good time”are used, which has displayed the history of invasion of the nature by mankind completely. The connection of pronouns stated that the essay deeply depend on the context, which give you sense that the author told you all this in front of your face.
John Steinbeck endow the words with life through the familiar use of language. The theme of protecting the environment is well presented.。