The paragraph that I was drawn to was the one that starts out "He has had other losses in his life". It didn't really hit me until after I had finished reading that it was actually describing Orlean's diction throughout the story, that it was switching back and forth between a ten-year-old's vocabulary and a higher, more grown-up vocabulary. It drives home the point that Collin is in this in-between state of not a child and not an adolescent. Or put another way, Collin knows enough about the adult world and about media that he is able to talk fluently in that language but still retains that innocence of not being fully aware of what he's saying.
What made this paragraph stick out to me was the high contrast in the sentence "Sometimes when he talks about this...". Such stark differences that appear back-to-back like in that sentence always makes readers do a double-take, I think. It makes people go back and reread to make sure that they understood it correctly the first time around and when that happens the reader can find things they didn't see before. Also the sentence "The collision in his mind..." stuck out because I love repetitive lists such as that. In sentences like that you can actually see the build-up to either a punchline or a dramatic reveal and it enhances the delivery.
Overall, this kept me engaged because of the knee-jerk switching between factual explanations, scenery descriptions, and dialogue. Sometimes it was confusing but that confusion kept me from getting bored with the story. What I really took from it was that in some places you don't need a segue between thoughts or scenes, but in others it is very important because if you don't put them there the audience won't get the joke.
I like what you said about how the shifting usage of language shows--without telling, hey hey imaginative writing--Colin's "in-between state of not a child and not a" grownup <---I say grown up rather than adolescent because I think that is what he is more concerned with in the story, less with becoming an adolescent.
ReplyDeleteThe sentence that you pointed out beginning, "the collision…" I really liked as well. But I liked the sentence after it even better, "The mess [in his mind] often has the form of what he will probably think like when he is a grown man, but the content of what he is like as a little boy." It's a strange and quite true truth said in an elegant way; isn't our grown up self just our ten-year-old self with some extra layers of nuances? We are probably mostly still interested in the same sort of things that we were at ten, but now there are a bunch of other things in our mind along with those things that we know and like, creating this big mess of thoughts that could have been predicted from our ten-year-old thoughts. So we are seeing Colin's ten-year-old thoughts right next to his grown up thoughts--mainly because they are almost the same things.