Analysis Of Zadie Smith's Swing Time

This explanation of the clock also resembles Mark Twain’s affirmation that, the best part of life comes at the beginning while the worst comes at the end. Keeping this in mind, Fincher then presents the audience with the character of Benjamin Button, a child who is born with all the physical characteristics of an elderly person and who is thereby doomed to age backwards in the same way as Monsieur Gateau’s clock.

And sometime the snow would be lift clean from the ground and up into the air, and by and by it would be all clapped to the ground as though there had been no wind at all, straightaway it would rise and fly again.

Throughout the text, Michael mentions the snow. Considering the book’s about a blizzard, that’d be normal, right? However, in my view, the snow symbolizes something, like dreadful times. Scattered around, the context surrounding the snow can be interpreted as how you feel during those times. For example, later in the book, when the students realize just how bad it is, they explain it as, “There was no higher ground, no place left for us to go”(Northrop 158). Here, a relation to people feeling as if there’s nowhere else to go, so they’re trapped in the horrible event occurring can be made. Results tend to be mourning over those poor times in people’s lives. Similarly, Michael connects that to how we view bad situations. Early on in the book, description of the snow is showed as it being “small flakes”, “like grains of sugar… the flakes had fattened up and

The temporal setting “oppress the character with the shape of a pendulum” (3) He fears its deadly velocity which represents his final hours of life. He feels terror of the doom that will “cut” his time on earth. As everyone knows, this symbolizes that death is inevitable.

In one of the extracts we were shown we see Tykwer uses distinctively visual techniques to show us Lola’s determination to save Manny. He utilises the use of a split screen with a close up shot of Manny and a close up tracking shot of Lola running to show how Lola is running towards him to try and save him. Then we hear the ticking of a clock and the top half of a clock comes onto the bottom of the screen to show how Lola is running out of time to save Manny. This is another example of how clocks are a reoccurring motif to symbolise time being overwhelming. This scene also demonstrates the love that Lola has for Manny and her determination to never give up trying to save him. This distinctively visual technique is utilised to hep show the audience that even with Lola’s everlasting love she is unable to change time and Manny slowly slips away from her, making himself unsaveable.

In this periodic sentence in Henry Longfellow’s “Snowflakes,” the sentence is left as an incomplete fragment until the last line. The snow falling is emphasized and the setting is left to be inferred with his long descriptions. This is effective because it allows the focus to be put on the setting initially, with suspense slowly building until the final statement.

Throughout the film ‘Snow Falling on Cedars’ the director Scott Hicks has used symbolism to convey a number of his ideas. He used the fog and snow to symbolise hidden secrets, the sea to represent life and death, and he used the Cedars to symbolise a place of secrecy and protection. By using these three symbols, Scott Hick’s ideas could be conveyed without anything being said at all.

Snow here could represent dullness or loneliness. Frost feels that everything or everyone around him are filled with loneliness, no excitement and everything seems to be the same. Line four in the poem says that “But a few weeds and stubble showing last.” Here it tells us that although dullness, emptiness, or loneliness covered almost everything around him, he could still see some life or excitement somewhere in between. Yet this small bits of life and excitement were nothing compared to the overwhelming emptiness. In the next couple of lines, Frost seems to have forgotten all about the weeds and stubble he saw and put his attention back to the empty, snow covered surroundings. He then looks at the woods near the field and that too have been covered in snow. He also mentioned that all the animals are covered in snow in their lairs. These two lines again emphasize how Frost feels. He knows that there are live around him, yet those life are also filled with emptiness. Soon he even realized that not only the surroundings that were filled with loneliness, but Frost himself are also in it as line eight says, “The loneliness includes me unawares.”

In the second stanza it is the semantic field of cold: ‘winter’, ‘ice’, ‘naked’, ‘snow’. All these lexical items give us a feeling of cold which evokes loneliness, unknown, fear.

why he stopped, may be he doesn’t know himself. May be, he is comparing the beauty of nature to something, but on a symbolic level, the snow strongly reminds me that the poem is set in winter, and which is also widely represented as the image of death.

She then told her that she had visitors, and her aunt and uncle came through the door. They interrupted her thoughts, because their faces were red, most likely from crying. They brought her flowers, and set them next to her bed. None of them knew what was going to happen next.

“Snow Bound”, a poem describing the joyous day for a boy who experienced snow for the first time. Author, John Greenleaf Whittier uses imagery perfectly. “The blue walls of the firmament, no cloud about, no earth below-a universe of sky and snow.” The author describes the setting of the poem by his use of rich and creative imagery.

Coupled with his depiction of Dublin’s immobile status through his characters, James Joyce also exemplifies his theme of paralysis through snow. In Daniel R. Schwarz’s psychoanalytic criticism of The Dead, he explains that “the snow imagery focuses our attention on a world outside Gabriel…where as ice, it suggests the emotional sterility of a world reduced to social gestures, empty talk, and loveless relationships” (Schwarz 123). However, I disagree with Schwarz and believe that James Joyce uses snow to symbolically represent the cold and dead Dublin due to its uncertain political period. When Gabriel first enters his aunt’s party, “A light fringe of snow lay like a cape on the shoulders of his overcoat and like toecaps on the toes of his galoshes; and as the buttons of his overcoat slipped with a squeaking noise through the snow-stiffened frieze, a cold fragrant air from out-of-doors escaped from crevices and folds” (The Dead 23). This symbolism comes back at the end of The Dead through Gabriel’s later thoughts on how the snow “was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills…falling upon every part of the lonely churchyard,” and touching both the living and the dead, symbolizing that not only Gabriel, but his entire country, both the living and the lifeless had been united in

In the case of “Snow in Midsummer” we may notice a somewhat paradoxical view on

The passage of time is intrinsically connected to every aspect of life, as it is the construct through which we understand human experiences and the framework through which we comprehend our existence. The essence and effects of temporality reverberate through narratives; acting as a catalyst for action, or becoming an impediment to the future. Through the response that characters in The Wanderer and The Tempest have towards the transience of time, it becomes clear how these effects echo throughout the narrative, prompting these events into movement, and how they seep throughout every aspect of these texts.