Notes of the 11^th/05/2012

About the extract taken from Hard Times by Charles Dickens, “Murdering the innocents”

From the beginning we have the impression that the narrator is speaking to somebody. “Sir” is a vocative. Who tells the story about Thomas Gradgrind is a third person omniscient narrator. The character is introduced in this passage: the first identification comes from his name and surname. The name has the function to identify a character and to distinguish it from another. The verb “to grind” means to mill, to mince and the sound of “Grandgrind” reminds the sound produced masticating. Mr. Dickens uses an anaphoric syntax to characterize the personality of the character. The personality is also given throughout the description of his way of thinking (“ he’s a man of …calculation”, “ready to weigh and measure”). “Ready to weight and measure any parcel of human nature” comes from the Victorian reality, that thought people are different from how they appear in reality. Augustus and George are common names. Augustus is an important person, known by everybody and arrogant.