The story for analysis is called "Ernestine" and written by Theodore Dreiser, who shows what the female success conceals.
The plot of the story centers around a woman who sacrifices her career in theatre for the existing world of cinema, where she hopes to win great fame. But her initial success leads her total failure.
So the subject matter is a person and her aspiration in career. And the idea of this short story is that ambitions often ruin a human being.
As for the composition of the text, it is not chronological, for it deals with the foreshadowing at the beginning of the story. This part of the story displays Dreiser's attitude to his character, who is sure to make mistakes or to be lead to some degradation. The use of such phrases as "eventually and perforce", "via related compulsions" and the use of the passive construction in the sentence "If anyone or anything is to be indicted, let it be life" are aimed at the attempts to persuade the reader that a person is not a ruler of his/her destiny, but a product of the society and circumstances.
As for me, I don't share Dreiser's point of view. At first I'd like to attract your attention to the epithets used by the narrator to describe the girl: "very young and not very sophisticated" and the verb to condescend in "Hers was a person who condescends to take notice of a domain offered for her inspection".
These epithets and the verb serve as proofs of the fact that she wasn't a naive girl, she was young, but had some experience of life and knew her own worth (had a high opinion of herself).
The following sentence is also of great importance "The first time I saw Ernestine she was coming down the steps of the Sixth Avenue Elevated Station".
The title "Elevated Station" and the phrasal verb "to come down" are symbolic here, for they are the evidence of the fact she didn't cognize all negative sides of "the joyous profession", but she has taken the road of it, and the use of the Past Continuous proves that.
In due course she starts to realize her own power: "Her temperament as well as her beauty was focal and she knew it". Her fame gives her an opportunity to have a high opinion of herself, that's why there is no wonder she becomes "too cool and too rain".
Другие лингво - стилистические анализы произведений:
