Text presentation

Язык и литература ( итальянский)

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Шевченко Мария

                                           Text presentation

                                        “Doctor in the house”

The text under consideration is entitled “Doctor in the house” by English author Richard Gordon.

We deal with only an extract from “Doctor in the house”. So it is rather difficult to state or to define the genre of the text.

The story tells us the process of exams, difficulties provided by them and students’ feelings and thoughts before and after examinations.

As for the theme of the text we must say that it is relationship between people within a society. I consider that the message is that an exam it’s not a climax of your life. The text belongs to fiction.

This story tells us about the final examination in a medical university. There are some peculiarities like in any other university. The exam is divided in two parts: written papers and oral examination. Of course, every student wants to pass exam and everybody is nervous at this period. The unpopular and last part of examination is oral examination which is held a week. After all these trials students wait the results impatiently. And, of course, there are those who passed and those who failed the exam. And then, unsuccessful students began to invert different stories about the injustice of university to justify their failure. But the main character isn’t one of those unfortunates, he passed the exam.

 As for the plot structure we may say it is direct. The climax of the text is concentrated in the following phrase: “Pass,” he muttered”.

As for the narrative method I can say that the narrator is a main character. We can see it through the text in the phrase which demonstrates us thoughts and feelings of the main character expressed by himself: “I walked down the stairs feeling as if I had just finished an eight – round fight.” And also there is a wide usage of the 1^st person in this text.

There are two characters in this story: Richard Gordon, the main character, and his friend Grimsdyke.

The main character of the text is the narrator Richard Gordon who is rather serious and responsible young man. As a bystander of current events he retells us his feelings and feelings of his mates. “Some of them strode up for an extra answer book, with an awkward expression of self – consciousness and superiority in their faces.” “I felt my stomach had been suddenly plucked from my body.”

Grimsdyke is also young man who studies medicine. But he’s less responsible and it seems that he doesn’t worry about his results. “However, I am not worried. They never read the papers anyway.”

To achieve desired effect in describing characters and environment, to make us feel within the situation the author uses different stylistic devices. He uses numerous thematic words to create the atmosphere of the exams such as: student, final examination, exams, cheating, textbooks, swot up, written papers, uniformed, tripos, viva; medical terms – tetanus, case, treatment, etc. Stylistic lexical meanings: similes – “like death”, “like the condemned cell”, “like having a severe accident”, “like an unexploded bomb”; metaphor – “judgment day”, “well- trodden paths”; epithets – unpleasant, convenient, fighting, frank, representative, impressionable, brilliant, unpopular, immediate, terrible, tiny, successful; synecdoche – “keep an eye”, etc. As for the syntactical level, the author uses stylistic inversion: “To a medical student the final examinations are something like death…”; comparison – “…and he goes at them like a prize – fighter.”,”…and gazing at him like impressionable music enthusiasts at the solo violinist.”, “…like the policemen that flank the dock at the Old Bailey.” We can see that the author uses different stylistic lexical meanings and syntactical level but the range those of comparison prevails.

I liked this text. It shows us a students’  life while the examination and also let us remember feelings during our exams. We can learn that the examination isn’t the most terrible thing in our lives and also we can understand that all our life is the big examination.