Find a passage of 1-2 sentences that shows the voice of Mictchell’s narrator, and transcribe it here. Write a few sentences of your own about what features of that voice make it distinctive: what speech patterns, vocabulary choices, etc. do you notice?
(You are free to close read someone else’s quotation as well!)
“Dad’s be called out of his Wednesday morning meeting. Truant officers officers and their sniffer dogs’d be put on my tail. I’d get captured, interrogated, skinned alive, and Mr. Kempsey’d still make me read a passage from Plain Prayers for a Complicated World.” (Mitchell 38)
This sentence shows the anxiety that the narrator feels and how much his stutter affects his mental state. These sentences also effectively capture the disproportionate worries that early teens face when it comes to the society not recognizing their needs and conditions. The vocabulary choices in these sentences show how big of a deal this situation is for the character rather than just a practice of reading out loud.
I like the quote Ayse chose and I think it does a good job of showing just how dreadful reading is for Jason. I agree that this quote shows how anxious he is and I also think it does a good job of giving him a childish tone. His fear of being interrogated and skinned alive is exaggerated and unlikely to happen, but it only emphasizes his very real and understandable fear of revealing his stammer to people who would only persecute him for it.
“I was dying to tell that prat that actually, if the Japanese hadn’t bombed Pearl Harbor, America’d never’ve come into the war, Britain’d’ve been starved into surrender, and Winston Churchill’d’ve been executed as a war criminal. But I knew I couldn’t. There were swarms of stammer-words in there, and Hangman’s bloody merciless this January. So I said I was busting for a waz, stood up, and went down the path to the village a bit” (8)
This shows how much knowledge Jason has but if he were to voice that, it’d either be a hit or a miss with people. In the text, dying and actually is italicized and shows the emphasis of how much Jason would like to correct one of the guys, but is afraid to because of his stammering. Even when Jason has factual or valid thoughts, his biggest insecurity is stopping him from saying it and overall indicate he’s still growing up. I could imagine “busting for a waz” would something a younger person would say.
“Hangman’ll crush my throat and mangle my tongue and scrunch my face up. Worse than Joey Deacon’s. I’m going to stammer worse than I’ve ever stammered in my life. By nine-fifteen my secret’ll be spreading round the school like a poison-gas attack. By the end of the first break my life wont be worth living.” Pg 27
Jason’s narration is always matter-of-fact. He doesn’t use maybe or other modal words because he doesn’t consider his expectations to be guesses. To Jason, social structures are what they are, and he uses his understanding of them to make predictions like scientific fact. This gives his voice a journalistic feel, where he is simply reporting the world without questioning why, without ascribing emotions, and without moral judgement.
Even his description of his dread is done through physicalizing the effects of his stammer (mangle, crush etc) and manifesting the cause of his stammer as an a separate entity with agency. Jason’s understanding of his own psyche and his own body is also filtered through social dynamics, which he considers immutable.
“My billion problems kept bobbing up like corpses in a flooded city. Mum and Dad at lunch. Hangman colonizing the alphabet. At this rate I’m going to have to learn sign language. Gary Drake and Ross Wilcox. They’ve never exactly been my best mates but today they’d ganged up against me. Neal Brose was in on it too. Last, the sour aunt in the woods worried me. How come?
Wished there was a crack to slip through and leave all this stuff behind. Next week I’m thirteen but thirteen looks way worse than twelve.”
I find Jason’s Hangman metaphor very interesting, and I think it’s important for us to keep it in mind as we read the rest of the book. He seems to overall be very wary and uncomfortable and scared and I think that all is interestingly manifested through his own understanding of his speech impediment. I also think Mitchell does a great job at making Jason’s voice that of a twelve (almost thirteen) year old child. While sometimes he uses metaphors and vocabulary that seems to be too complicated for a twelve-year-old, the other choices he makes that gives us the theme of teenagehood and discomfort allow for the complicated vocabulary to slip along easily without breaking the point of view.