Charming Billy: Blog 1
Sarah Ganzenmuller
Wednesday, July 30, 2014
Swiftly and effortlessly within the first couple of pages of
Charming Billy Alice McDermott manages to grasp ahold of her readers by
both toying with their curiosity and taking full advantage of suspension. She
uses descriptive imagery and figurative language to eloquently describe the
scene of the funeral which unfolds before your eyes as a sort of mystery due to
the fact you are left in the dark for a considerable amount of time about who
it is who actually died, and how. Her purpose is to fully engage her readers
from the very first page, gaining their loyalty through her exquisite and
detailed descriptions yet tactfully leave them wanting more so they read on.
When she finally does give them something to hold on to, a name and a reason,
Billy, who died because he was an alcoholic, she still leaves room for further
explanation. This is necessary because rather than having the focal point of
the book be towards the middle, she puts the climax at the beginning and works
her way from there. She leaves you wanting to know more about Billy, his life,
and the reasons behind his alcohol addiction. Her technique is particularly
clear in the following quote on page 7, as the passage contributed immensely to
the readers desire to learn more.
“And if you loved him, we all knew, you pleaded with him at
some point. Or you drove him to AA, waited outside the church till the meeting
was over, and drove him home again. Or you advanced him whatever you could
afford so he could travel to Ireland to take the pledge. If you loved him, you
took his car keys away, took his incoherent phone calls after midnight. You
banished him from your house until he could show up sober. You saw the bloodied
scraps of flesh he coughed up into his drinks. If you loved him you told him at
some point that he was killing himself and felt the way his indifference ripped
through your affection.”
The most
evident rhetorical strategy used here is parallelism. The whole entire
paragraph consists of sentence similarly structured to give what McDermott is
saying more power. Because she carries this parallelism throughout the quote it
almost seems although it is more of a poem than a piece of writing. She does
this through her repetition and progression of the start of each sentence which
goes from “if you loved him” to “or
you” followed by “you” and finally,
looping back to the original beginning “if you loved him”.
McDermott
also successfully appeals to your emotions here, in a couple of different ways.
By showing how people cared for Billy you in turn grow to care for him
yourself, because you cant help but to feel if others went through all this
trouble for him he must have been worth it. That is the very purpose of the
many small sentences of the different things people did for him placed
together. It has a lengthening effect making it seem like an extensive list,
successfully gaining the readers sympathy and appreciation. The gruesome detail
of the bloodied scraps of flesh Billy coughed up into his drinks also provides
as a shocking appeal to ones emotions, but in a different way. This the readers
would most likely find appalling, yet it gains sympathy for Billy once again.
The final sentence to the quote is a killer. “If you loved him you told him at
some point that he was killing himself and felt the way his indifference ripped
through your affection.” Now that McDermott has got you hooked on Billy,
convinced of his worthiness and wonderfulness, leaving you grieving over his
troubles you are suddenly hit with the little fact that Billy didn’t care if he
lived or died. This has the reader completely hooked, because now they need to
figure out why. Why did death not fear Billy? What horrible things happened to him
that allowed him to see death as a comfort rather than something to run from? These
are questions McDermott leaves you wondering. These are the questions that propel
you into the remainder of the book, hungry to understand.
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