The Kite Runner: Syntax Evaluation

Hannah Shute Period: 5 Punctuation: The punctuation used includes periods, commas, and dashes. This affects the way the book is read. It makes you feel like you are talking to someone who is telling a story and giving background information. Sentence length: The length of the sentences seems to be in a pattern of long short long short. I believe that the sentence length can symbolize what Amir was thinking as a child. Sometimes, thoughts can go on forever, but other thoughts are short and to the point. Devices o Independent and dependent clauses: Khaled Hosseini uses a mixture of independent and dependent clauses in his writing. For example: He was making preparing his speech for the next day, flipping through a havoc of handwritten pages This complexity in the book makes it more exciting and detailed. o Conjunctions: There is not much use of conjunctions it this part of the text, but does use complex sentences. o Repetition: there is one instance of repetition in this part of the text. It is in Babas answers to Amirs questions. He always grunts, as if he doesnt want to answer such stupid questions. o Parallelism: There is lots of good parallelism in this part of the text. For example: They were sitting on the dock, feet dangling in the water, fishing poles in hand o Fragments: There is only one fragment in this excerpt from the text. It says, Told me I could get the soda myself, all I had to do was look in the trunk of the car. This fragment was obviously done on purpose, to show the shortness of Baba. Sentence beginnings: Hosseini mixes up his sentence beginnings, and I think the purpose of this is to make the text more complex and interesting to read. Most sentences begin with the subject, but other sentences start with a prepositional phrase. Changes: The syntax in this text varies from sentence to sentence. Some sentences are simple, while others are complex. He emphasizes the complexities of thinking and the simplicities of life in a poetic way. Evaluate: I think that the syntax from this excerpt is beautiful and easy to understand. For example, Khalid Hosseini describes the view from across the lake when Amir is sitting with Baba. In the distance, across the lake, a truck lumbered around a corner on the hill. Sunlight twinkled in its side-view mirror. The contrast between the complex and simple sentence gives a beautiful poetic air to the text. It is easy to understand the descriptions and feel like you are the character.