Similarities Between 'Shame And' The Libido For The Ugly

Describing emotions, or reliving emotions, there are many ways authors chose to tell their recollection of emotions they have experienced in their life. In “Shame” by Dick Gregory and “The Libido for the Ugly” by H.L Mencken the authors use different diction, syntax, and placement to achieve their narrative and descriptive purposes. Each author strives to display a point in their life where they have experienced deep emotions, whether that be with people or with objects displayed throughout their essays, each just as powerful as the other. The diction used in the essays both describes an emotion the author was feeling during this moment in their life. In “Shame” by Dick Gregory, the author notes his experience with shame, quoting, “It seemed

The author uses vivid imagery and dialogue to convey his story about how he struggled with feeling ashamed of himself as a child. Being descriptive in the word choices he uses such as, “idiot’s seat” and “nice warm mackinaw” he uses little descriptions that would further your fictional image of the story. He sticks to plain and simple adjectives and only uses one or two to describe the noun preceding them, to stay simple. In comparison, Mencken who writes a descriptive essay, notes his experience in the U.S. and how unsettling the view is to him. He uses many adjectives before the noun compared to Gregory, who stays simple. Mencken says in paragraph 3, “It is, in form, a narrow river valley, with deep gullies running up into the hills. It is thickly settled, but noticeably overcrowded”. He uses many different adjectives such as, “deep gullies”, “thickly settled”, and “noticeably overcrowded” to describe his scene on the passenger train. All within just one sentence we can picture the land these houses are confounded on, which makes his writing so powerful. Since he uses more descriptive writing than Gregory the internal image the reader will find is more profound and includes more

In “The Libido for the Ugly”, Mencken uses his dependent clauses to build suspense and his questionable tone. Throughout his essay, Mencken questions the choice in appearances that America chose for the citizens to live in. For example, Mencken says that “Here was the very heart of industrial America, the center of its most lucrative and characteristic activity, the boast and pride of the richest and grandest nation ever seen on earth—and there was a scene so dreadfully hideous, so intolerably bleak and forlorn that it reduced the whole aspiration of a man to a macabre and depressing joke”. In this quote, Mencken seems to be upholding what people believe America seems to be, he says that it is the “richest” and “grandest” nation, then calls it a “depressing joke” because of what he saw while taking a trip in America. He constantly uses his dependent clauses to display sarcasm and the emphasis he carries on how broken America seems to be. In contrast, Dick Gregory often uses independent sentences to tell his narrative and uses dependent sentences to explain his thoughts. In paragraph 1 Gregory states, “in the morning I’d put them on, wet or dry, because they were the only clothes I had”, another example is in paragraph 5 he states, “all you could think about was noontime,