Violence In Mamet's The Rake

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Thesis: In Mamet’s The Rake: A Few Scenes from My Childhood, the use of run-on sentences and undescriptive language when discussing the abuse inflicted by male figures of Mamet’s family illustrates a disconnect from the people he calls his family. The nonchalant, passive storytelling dismisses the graphic nature of the violent acts and portrays the actions in an excusable light, exemplifying the mindsets of the abusers. Mamet employs a description of events in his childhood in a distant manner, particularly avoiding emotional, visceral imagery and utilizing the passive voice to further distant himself from the events unfolded. When describing one incident of violence by his stepfather, Mamet says, “My sister pushed the door open further and said—I don’t know…show more content…
When describing the abuse inflicted upon his sister, Mamet simply makes a list of physical actions, using verbs such as ‘saw,’ ‘picked up,’ and ‘passed.’ All these words describe physical movements and the act of violence but do not display any sort of emotion that may accompany the act of violence. The sentence above employs polysyndetons to enumerate the different actions of the stepfather, but in the long run-on, Mamet does not include any emotion that his sister or his stepfather may have experienced. In this way, Mamet removes himself from the incident itself, objectively describing the events as if they were happening to people he had no relation to. His narration of this essay is from an almost third person perspective. Occasionally, he injects…show more content…
After the incident of abuse, Mamet

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