Indledning
When you have a car as a teenager, then will the car be one’s identity. Like the actor Alexandra Paul once said:
“The cars we drive say a lot about us”, and this specific quote describes Marina Keegan’s essay “Stability in Motion”, an essay from The Opposite of Loneliness:
Essay and Stories (2014) which describes her personal experiences of her first car, a Toyota Camry 1990. The essay is written in 1st narrator.
The fact that it is a 1st narrator enables us as readers to become convinced or interested in the topic identity, and that we can identify us with her own personal experiences of all the memories one's first car brings.
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Uddrag
Keegan uses her own personal experiences, so she can build credibility and authority.
Throughout the essay, Keegan describes her own experiences of having a car as a teenager and she uses them to personify her car with herself: “My car was not gross; it was occupied, cluttered, cramped.
It became an extension of my bedroom, and thus an extension of myself.” (ll. 102 - 105, p. 7) here is she describing her car as an extension of herself or her identity.
So, she describes herself by using the car instead of herself, where then she describes herself as being a cluttered, occupied and cramped person, which maybe many teenagers also feel about themselves.
We are also told that the car is a personally way to describe her adolescence: “That old Toyota Camry was an odd documentation of my adolescence.” (ll. 254 - 255, p. 9), so the old Toyota Camry is just her identity.
The car is also her emotional timeline where she example experiences her first kiss, which happened in her car: “I could hardly open the side door without reliving the first time he kissed me.” (ll. 141 - 142, p. 8).
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