Literary Analysis Essay on Snapshots of a Wedding & Thing Around Your Neck

Introduction

Authors avoid simply writing what happened when writing a story; instead, they use literacy skills that are narrative techniques that help to add energy and excitement to the short stories and other narratives. The literary skills also help to convey the main information that is displayed in the stories and bring out the main themes that the author would like to display. The authors of the stories "Snapshots of a wedding" and "The thing around your neck" use different literary skills to bring out the main ideas of the stories that are the pain and suffering that the characters face in the story.

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Snapshots of a Wedding

In the story "Snapshots of a Wedding," the literary skills that are used by the author include diction, where the choice of words of the author has similar denotative meanings and different connotative meanings that display the associations displayed with certain words chosen for use. Most of the words that Head (1977) uses are a display of the conflict and oppression that exists in the African village traditions.

An epigraph is another literary skill that the author uses by using quotations from other works to make their works stronger and more understandable to the general audience. The author of this short story uses different settings of quotations from her past works that are a display of the African culture and how it affected the lives of people, especially those who were in love, but the society was against them.

The author of this story also uses euphemism to add to the taste of the flow of information by incorporating phrasing and imagery. The ululating relatives of Neo that are shown in the short story are a resemblance of the nature of the ceremony, which they form part of (Head, 1977). The rituals displayed show the past that should bring out prosperity expected from the suffering that the characters had experienced in the past. Just like the ox explained in the short story is led to be slaughtered, Kegoletile is shown to be like the ox as he will be led to the wedding at the altar and have his life change forever.

The author of this story also uses point of view as a literary skill with the short story featuring a narration in the third person. The story is told in a way that someone who is not a character in the story explains all details that unfold around the main characters and the situations that lead to the relation of inner conflicts experienced in the display of the main themes.

The Thing Around Your Neck

In the story "The thing around your neck," the literary skills that the author uses include suspense, tone, and mood, foreshadowing, and understatement. Chimamanda Adichie uses suspense to show the brutality that exists in the Nigerian soldiers who lack any compassion in treating the citizens of the country (Adichie, 2009). The way that they display citizens as powerless leaves the readers of the story with the suspense of the events that are going to transpire next from the previous events. This suspense helps in making the reader stay glued to the story and hoping to find out how the end will be for the country.

The author uses tone and mood by creating an uncomfortable tone in the story to catch the attention of the readers. All characters in the story are either in situations that are most likely to create a conflict or are in situations where conflicts already exist (Adichie, 2009). The mood of the story is more uncomfortable and suspenseful, which is brought out in different aspects to ensure that the reader understands the suffering of the people in the story and how their fate ends.

Foreshadowing and understatements are other literacy skills that the author uses in the short story where different characters are warned of the future that will come to be from the riots that are happening in the country. When Chika loses her sister, this scene acts as a foreshadow that Nnedi will be killed in the riots in the later parts of the story. Understatement is used in the story to show the effects that competition of power in the story has on children. The way that Neil shows little concern about the way that children will be affected by the riots is an understatement because harmful effects are realized in the children, and they grow to adulthood with the same negative effects.

References

Adichie, C. (2009). The Thing around Your Neck. Retrieved 18 December 2019, from http://icpla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Adichie-CN-The-Thing-Around-Your-Neck.pdf

Head, B. (1977). Snapshots of a Wedding. The Collector of Treasures, and Other Botswana Village Tales, 79-86.