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Гуманитарные науки
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4
Amalya Poghosyan
Yerevan State University, Faculty of Romance and Germanic Philology, bachelor 4th year
Supervisor: Candidate of Philological Sciences, Associate Professor A. Matevosyan
E-mail: [email protected]
LINGUISTIC AND EXTRA-LINGUISTIC FACTORS IN
W. SAROYAN’S SHORT STORIES
William Saroyan is an internationally renowned Armenian-American writer, playwright
and humanitarian. His fame and his most enduring achievements as a writer, date from the
1930’s. He dazzled, entertained and uplifted millions, with hundreds of short stories, plays,
novels, memories and essays, which continue to charm and touch us even today. His stories
celebrated optimism in the middle of trials and difficulties of the Depression-era. Several of
Saroyan’s works were drawn from his own experiences, although his approach to
autobiographical facts can be called poetic.
Saroyan is unique among writers. He acknowledged the Armenian culture as an important
source of literary inspiration. William Saroyan achieved great popularity through the thirties,
forties and fifties. His works have been translated into more than two dozen languages. To
fully enjoy Saroyan, either in prose or on the stage, you have to be “with” him. This may
require effort, but once you are with him, he can take you to the places you have never been
before.
Saroyan really appreciated the WORD. Here I would like to cite his own words for
showing his attitude clearly: “All successful writers believe that one word by itself hasn’t
enough meaning and that it is best to emphasize the meaning of one word with the help of
another. Some writers will go so far as to help an innocent word with as many as four and five
other words, and at times they will kill an innocent word by charity and it will take years and
years for some ignorant writer who doesn’t know adjectives at all to resurrect the word that
was killed by kindness”1.
Now we would like to analyze those stylistic devices which Saroyan employs in his
stories.
One of Saroyan’s most touching stories is “The Oranges”. This story tells us about a
young orphan boy, Luke, who after his parent’s death lived with his uncle’s family. They lived
in poverty and that was the reason for everyday skirmishes between Uncle Jake and his wife.
Their only source of income was selling oranges. Luke had to stand on the corner of the street,
smile, and wave oranges to the automobiles passing by (they thought that if people see a little
smiling boy selling oranges, they will certainly buy). It was too difficult for him to smile as his
soul was mourning, his soul was full of pain and sufferings; he wanted to cry, how he can
smile. And every day before going to street his uncle gave him instructions, Luke tried to
smile, but he knew that his smile was really awful. Here Saroyan used the subjunctive mood to
emphasize and show the feelings of the poor boy:
“He wished he could laugh out loud the way some people laugh, only they weren’t scared
the way he was, …”2
Another stylistic device which we can find in Saroyan’s stories is anastrophe – a figure of
speech, the stylistic effect of which is achieved by the deliberate violation of normal syntactic
order. It is the inversion of the normal word order for particular effect.
1
2
Saroyan W., The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze and other stories, New York, 1961, p. 2.
Saroyan W., Selected short stories, Moscow, 1975, p. 93.
163
“Then Jake made a face, so sad it looked, as if nobody was ever that sad in the world”1.
The word ‘sad’ forces the meaning of being really sad.
In this story we also come across cases of simile and metaphor. Simile is a figure of
speech which consists in an explicit likening of one thing to another on the basis of a common
feature2. A metaphor is a relation between dictionary and contextual logical meaning based on
the affinity or similarity of certain properties or features of two corresponding concepts3. They
make the work more influential, powerful and imposing. Here are some examples:
“He could hear her crying and kissing him and telling him he was just a baby, a great big
baby, he needed her like a mother”. (p. 96)
“…and the sky was sad, and there were no leaves on the trees, and the street was sad, and
it was very funny, the smell of the oranges was clean and good and they looked so nice it was
very funny. The oranges looked so nice and they were so sad”. (p. 97)
Here, we see a nice usage of personification too (the sky was sad, the street was sad, the
oranges were so sad)
In this story we can find an example of pun (play of words) as well:
“Peel it and smell the nice smell and eat it” (p. 99)
Repetition is another common stylistic device, it is the repetition of a word, within a
sentence or a poetical line, with no particular placement of the words, in order to emphasize.
We can find lots of cases of repetition in this story. Saroyan repeats conjunction ‘and’ after
almost each word in the whole paragraphs. This phenomenon is called polysyndeton. We think
he did so in order to give more emphasis to the words and make the speech more influential.
And also to show the repeated and annoying action, from which the boy was sick and tired. I
will bring certain examples to make it clear.
“What the use to go to school and learn arithmetic and read poems and paint eggplants
and all that stuff? What’s the use to sit in cold room until it is time to go to bed and hear Jake
and his wife fighting all the time and go to sleep and cry and wake up and see the sad sky and
feel the cold air and shiver and walk to school and eat oranges for lunch instead of bread?”
(p. 96)
Anadiplosis is the repetition of the last word of a preceding clause. The word is used at the
end of a sentence and then used again at the beginning of the next sentence (en. wikipedia.
org). In the following example under study there are cases of anadiplosis and again repetition
of ‘and’, i. e. polysyndeton.
“He brought his arms down and stopped smiling and looked at the fire hydrant and
beyond the fire hydrant the gutter and beyond the gutter the street and on both sides of the
street houses and in the houses people and in the end of the street the country where the
vineyards and orchards were and streams and meadows and then mountains and beyond the
mountains more cities and more houses and streets and people. ” (p. 98)
Anaphora is a figure, a rhetorical device involving the repetition of words in successive
clauses4.
“All right, all right, all right, kill me, drive me crazy” (p. 94)
“Should I stand in the street, holding oranges? Should I get a wagon maybe and go
through the street? I should be dead. ” (p. 95)
The final paragraph of the story embraces all the feelings of the unfortunate boy, his
thoughts, his inner stormy world, his wrecked fortune. And this passage reaches that
impressiveness again due to the genius of William Saroyan. Here he again uses different kinds
of repetitions which strengthens the overall effect. It is one long sentence connected with
different repeated conjunctions to keep the reader close to the plot.
1
Ibid, p. 95.
Gasparyan S., Matevosyan A., English style in action, Yerevan, 2011, p. 159.
Galperin I., Stylistics, Moscow, 1971, p. 136.
4
Gasparyan S., Matevosyan A., English style in action, p. 137.
2
3
164
“He just guessed that’s all he was born to do, just stand on the corner and wave oranges
at the people and smile at them with great big tears coming down his cheeks till the end of the
world, everything black and empty and him standing there smiling until his cheeks hurt and
crying because they wouldn’t even smile back at him and for all he cared the whole world just
fall into the darkness and end and Jake could be dead and his wife could be dead and all the
streets and houses and people and rivers and meadows and sky could end and there could be
nobody anywhere, not even one man anywhere or one empty street or dark window or one shut
door because they didn’t want to buy oranges and they wouldn’t smile at him, and the whole
world could end. ”
(The Oranges, William Saroyan, 1975. p. 99)
In the author’s speech we can find words which help us to read the indirect speech
correctly and see also the extra-linguistic factors used by the author:
“So she shouted” (p. 95)
“There was a box of oranges on the floor, and she picked up two of them, crying, and she
said, “No fire in the stove, in November, all of us freezing. The house should be full of the
smell of meat. Here, ” she cried, “eat. Eat your oranges. Eat them until you die” and she cried
and cried”.
The next story which I would like to analyze is another masterpiece of Saroyan. It is “The
Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze”. Each word, each figure used in this story is
intentional. It is a combination of feelings, emotions and philosophical thoughts about life and
afterlife. The only character in this story is a nameless young man who has been trying
unsuccessfully to earn his living as a writer. After a long time without a job and not having
enough to eat, he is already suffering the effects of starvation. At the beginning of the story the
protagonist is making his last attempt to survive, by going into town one last time to try to find
a job. The story is divided into two parts: sleep and wakefulness. In the first part the author
recounts the character’s dream; he was sleeping and in his dream took place uncertain and
obscure things, different characters doing strange labor. All this resemble to “the path to
paradox”. Saroyan uses different imposing and powerful epithets and adjectives both in their
literary sense and metaphorically to illustrate his dream vividly:
“… a gallery of watercolors, the sea and the fish with eyes, symphony, a table in the
corner of the Eiffel Tower, jazz at the opera house, alarm clock and the tap dancing of doom,
conversation with a tree, the river Nile, the roar of Dostoyevsky, and the dark sun.
This earth, the face of one who lived, the form without the weight, weeping upon snow,
white music, the magnified flower twice the size of the universe, black clouds, the caged
panther staring, deathless space…” 1
In the above mentioned part we also notice a case of personification –a trope in which an
animate or human feature is ascribed to an abstract concept2, e. g. “conversation with a tree”,
“dancing of doom”. Also he uses personification for the penny he found in the gutter: ‘how
prettily it smiles’.
And after, when he woke up, he realized that the dream was ended and the cruel life in the
world began: “O swift moment of life, it is ended, again the earth is now. ”
The whole action of the second part, wakefulness, takes place in one single day, and it is
expressed in very specific actions in a chronological sequence of events: the young man wakes
up, shaves, gets dressed, makes and drinks coffee, goes out of his rented room, finds a coin on
the street and keeps it in his pocket, goes into the city, visits some employment agencies and
department stores looking unsuccessfully for a job, goes to the YMCA (Young Men’s Christian
Association) to get some paper in order to write his "Application for Permission to Live, "
1
2
Saroyan W., The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, p. 33.
Gasparyan S., Matevosyan A., English style in action, p. 155.
165
visits the public library where he reads a little, returns to his room, polishes the coin he had
found on the street, lies down on his bed to rest a little, and finally dies.
Throughout all these events the hero is fighting against life and death. He realizes that his
physical existence is not possible any more but he never gives up. For him the survival of his
inner being is much more important than the physical being. Eventually it becomes clear that
physical death does not represent the end of existence to this writer, but a progression into
another sphere of existence. He thought:
“There is only in sleep that we may know we live. There only, in that living death, do we
meet ourselves and the far earth…”(p. 34)
Here Saroyan uses enantiosemy ‘living death’ for more emphasis.
The author uses different euphemisms for death: ‘… a young man of twenty-two was to be
permanently ejected from it’, ‘swimming away to the beginning’, ‘he was gone from his body’;
‘he turned his lost face to the empty sky and became dreamless, unalive, perfect’.
And also for fainting: ‘He seemed to be swimming away from himself’.
All his hope for surviving faded and disappeared and there were nothing to do more but:
“I’ll go and sleep some more, ” he said; “there is nothing else to do”.
He knew that he was dying and faced his death straightforwardly. He wanted to live one
more day, to read one more book and to feel the sweetness of life for the last time:
“He accepted the thought of dying without pity for himself or for man, believing that he
would at least sleep another night. His rent for another day was paid; there was yet another
tomorrow. And after that he might go where other homeless men went. ”(p. 36)
All stylistic means used by Saroyan make the story more and more touching, excites pity
for the young dying man, and at the same time makes us believe in his salvation.
Italics is a common English way of stressing a word or phrase. The use of italics as means
of stress is very typical for Saroyan – we can find it in nearly every paragraph of his works. We
perceive it as a part of Saroyan´s style, it reminds of spoken, narrative language. Italicized
support the natural flow of the narrative – they are the words the author would have stressed
while speaking and they help the reader imagine him telling those stories. In these two stories
we can find a lot of cases of italics, even whole italicized paragraphs, as well.
Thus, we have tried to illustrate all linguistic means used by William Saroyan. But for
general and overall understanding of Saroyan’s stories we need extra-linguistic skills as well.
Together with all linguistic factors, extra-linguistic factors are also essential in Saroyan’s
works. While reading his stories we can get acquainted and learn a lot about American and
Armenian culture (especially about Armenian culture in America). It is like a bridge which
connects these two cultures. And of course for understanding his works thoroughly and clearly
we should have some knowledge about the author, his biography and his literary views. We
can find biographical traces in almost all stories of Saroyan. Thus the knowledge of the
author’s biography, culture, origin, his worldview is essential.
All these factors taken together make Saroyan’s works unique, extraordinary, expressive
and original.
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166
Амалия Погосян
ЛИНГВИСТИЧЕСКИЕ И ЭКСТРА – ЛИНГВИСТИЧЕСКИЕ ФАКТОРЫ
В ПРОИЗВЕДЕНИЯХ УИЛЬЯМА САРОЯНА
В данной статье объектом изучения стали лингвистические и экстралингвистические
факторы в произведениях Уильяма Сарояна. Также наряду с некоторыми биографическими
данными самого автора упоминаются употребляемые Сарояном стилистические приемы. Сароян
настоящий мастер слова, и с помощью простых слов и стилистических приемов ему удается
передать целую череду волнений и чувств, что и делает его произведения уникальными,
эмоциональными и чарующими.
167