Eksamensæt i skriftlig Engelsk A HHX den 18. august 2016
Opgavebeskrivelse
Write an analytical essay in which you analyse and interpret the short story "De-Luxe Model" by Adam Thorpe. Part of your essay must focus on characterization, setting, theme(s) and message.
Write the analytical essay in English.
Word count: 800-1200 words
Use the following source: "De-Luxe Model" by Adam Thorpe
Indledning
Adam Thorpe is a British poet, novelist and playwright whose works also include short stories and radio dramas. His most famous work is the novel "Ulverton" from 1992, which is an episodic work covering 350 years of English rural history.
The short story "De-Luxe Model" is about an 11-year-old boy, who is very fascinated by his friend’s parents’ new dishwasher. The themes in this short story are development and modernity.
In this analytical essay, I’m going to focus on the characterisation of the narrator, the setting, the themes and message of the short story.
”De-Luxe Model” is about an 11-year-old boy, who gives the impression that the arrival of a dishwasher in his friend’s family has made on him. The narrator, who is a boy, has a friend named Hugh Gould, whose parents have quite recently remodelled their whole kitchen.
A day where the narrator is in Hugh’s home, he notices the new remodelled kitchen, but especially the dishwasher. Hugh’s mom request that the boys take part in loading and unloading the dishwasher. While the dishwasher is running the boys go into Hugh’s room, because Hugh wants to show the narrator a secret.
The secret is that Hugh has a mouse named Basildon Ebenezer Bond, who lives in his room in a little box. When the boys unload the dishwasher, the narrator notices that Hugh’s parents have a strange relationship.
The next day, the narrator lets the mouse escape from its box and decides to keep it in his jacket, so no one would know. Nonetheless, after loading the dishwasher after lunch, the narrator is horrified to discover that the mouse isn’t any longer in his jacket.
He sincerely hopes that the mouse isn’t in the dishwasher. However, when Hugh’s parents unload the dishwasher, they are terrified by a corpse of a mouse. The story ends with Hugh running to his room to check whether his mouse is alright or not, while the narrator is getting ready to lie about ever even touching it.
In spite of that, I have to know a little bit more about the narrator, as well as the other characters, to know the story fully.
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Uddrag
Simultaneously, the narrator has a tendency to examine and analyze Hugh’s parents, but his focus is more on Hugh’s father.
This is likely a hint that the narrator needs a new male figure in his life, because he lost his father two years before the events in the story took place, and therefore is searching for it elsewhere “Ronald, Hugh’s father, worked there all day as a representative for a Peruvian gold-mining company.
Or that’s what Hugh claimed. Ronald also had his own dressing room, which I thought was a good idea, as I hated dressing in front of my twin brothers.” “Ronald looked strange in rubber gloves and a pinny, with his bristly moustache; he wasn’t much taller than me.
He had panned for gold in Peru and sheltered in a cinema doorway during an earthquake that had killed twenty-two thousand people in a few minutes.”
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