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Manhattan Beach Sparknotes

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Old-fashioned deep sea diving suits are extremely heavy, painful, and difficult to wear. The novel Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan describes Anna’s experience of wearing a copper-head deep sea diving suit for the first time. Egan details this adventure by using descriptive diction with figurative language and point of view, expressing the challenging feat faced by Anna. The diction used by Egan creates a detailed illustration of Anna’s pain and struggle, and allows the reader to fully understand her experience. The “crushing weight” of the suit quickly affected Anna as she struggled to stand. But as she gathered the strength to stand, Egan used metaphors to describe the pain Anna endured, she felt a “sensation of nails being pounded into her flesh” and pain so extreme that it made her “eyes swim.” The explicit thought of nails being driven into her shoulders displays to the audience the reality and harshness of Anna’s pain, detailing how Anna is fighting through intense agony, and connecting the experience closer to the reader. …show more content…

Anna was eventually tasked with untying a knotted rope while in the suit. This task distracts Anna from the overbearing weight of the suit by “delivering her to a. realm that seemed to exist outside the rest of life.” Showing that when Anna’s can focus on something other than the overbearing suit, she can distract herself from the physical constraints of the suit. As well as descriptive figurative language, Egan creates an illustration of Anna’s experience from the point of view in which the story was written. Manhattan Beach was written from a third person point of

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