Diction In Katharine Brush's Birthday Party

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Katharine Brush 's short story "Birthday Party" is about the perjury of a third person 's judgment about a birthday party thrown by a wife for her husband. Is truly a story with an objective to challenge defining how a man-woman relationship should function. This short story reveals how joyless a marriage can be when spouses are too unimaginative to stray from the bourgeois affection. The use of descriptions, perspective, diction and syntax portray the husband’s insolence so well that its purpose to induce the reader’s disgust is utterly achieved. Sensory details reveal how insignificant the celebration quickly rises into a heartbreaking emotional embarrassment. She begins by describing her subject by their simple physical …show more content…

Lastly, deliberating use of diction and syntax assist notable and evoking broken relationship. The fact that they sit in a "narrow" restaurant suggests that with their bland, stable demeanor, perhaps they are narrow-minded. With the couple 's strict regard for the appropriate behavior of a man and wife, as is evident later in the text; they certainly have narrow perceptions of proper marriage etiquette. The last paragraph, unearths the contrast between the wife 's child-like behaviors to her husband 's. The line "You looked at him and you saw this and you thought, 'Oh, now don 't be like that!" and the author 's italicization of the word "be" implies a certain amount of disgust for a husband who is trying to crush his wife 's jovial spirit. With a spit of contempt, Brush adds that "he was like that" (line fifteen), intensifying her anger and disapprobation of his meanness. The intended use of the pronoun ‘you.’ brought the reader even more intimate with the situation at hand, persuading the reader to keep reading to see what happens next. The general attention shift when the author now introduces “I” because this, again, brings the reader closer to the incident; by doing this, the reader is not only reading about it, but he is reading a personal account of it. She writes that she, “couldn’t bear to look at the woman,” after the husband cruelly said something to his wife because she accidentally embarrassed him, and this puts the reader in the author’s shoes of encountering a relationship that