Thursday, October 15, 2009

Blog#7 - David Sedaris

From the first day that I saw the cover of this novel, I always wondered: “It’s a humorous novel, but why is there a skeleton on cover?” I wasn’t until I read the chapter “Memento Mori” that questioned had been answered. It was gift for Hugh, David’s lover, see Hugh had his favorite professor and in that classroom there was skeleton. This skeleton was very important to Hugh, that when he received it as a gift, it was hung by string in their bedroom. As anyone’s normal reaction, David was haunted by this skeleton and would always think it was talking to him. “Having been dead for three hundred years, there’s a lot the skeleton doesn’t understand: TV for instance. ‘See’ I told him, ‘you just push this button, and entertainment comes into your home.’ He seemed impressed, and so I took it a step further. ‘I invented it myself, to bring comfort to the old and sick.’ ‘You are going to die.’” This passage is interesting to me, just to see the imagination that Sedaris has and how humorous it is. Who will ever find themselves talking to a skeleton and explain to that skeleton that they invented TV?

David Sedaris really does not have a pace for how he writes his chapters. The only pattern brought up that I noticed was that certain stories have the same theme, other than that most of his stories are not in chronological order to his age. Structure of his writing in these two chapters, is very jumbled as he starts with a story when he was younger and then writes of a story when he was in a totally different country and subject. Again, in these two chapters, “Memento Mori” and “Adult Figures Charging Toward Concrete Toadstool” the diction is very simple to understand and the word choice makes it easy for the reader to picture what was going on.

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