The Long Walk By Stephen King Essay

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The novel The Long Walk by Stephen King was best suited for a formalist criticism because the elements of the story are all found within the text. Using a chronological frame to structure the story it begins on the morning of May 1st, at the Maine/Canada border where the 100 teenage boys participating in The Long Walk wait for the Major to officially start the competition at exactly 9:00 am. The story then goes on next to describe the events that take place from the main antagonist, Raymond Garraty’s, perspective through a third-person point of view, touching on the personal feelings and thoughts of the character as a way to enrich the texts meaning and detail while also develop the reader's own perspective on what they are reading. The…show more content…
This was revealed to readers through the use of pronouns such as he, him and his from a third-person point of view, and the use of only Garraty’s thoughts, feelings, etc. in a more personal detail than the other characters whose own thought’s and feelings were put into what you would see in the text from a first-person point of view. (In this case Garraty’s view). The author, Stephen King, uses metaphoric language to describe the underlying topics associated in the text, for example, bullying, losing friends in life, the role that sports play in our culture/society, and other more sensitive topics such as sexuality. His symbolic choices in the text are mostly used to describe life and death, ie; “99 bottles of beer on the wall, and if one of those bottles should happen to fall,”(pg.39) and how the lines on the pavement were “[a] pattern of life and death in that white paint,”(pg.124). He also uses descriptive language and a variation of light, fun tones when the teens are remembering memories or experiencing bonding moments between each other during the competition, while using darker, sinister and heavier tones when he is describing the death of a walker, mental breakdowns and moments of lost hope. Stephen King used these four literary techniques in order to convey stronger,more realistic and relatable feeling towards the
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