LAST BLOG!

Vocabulary: Thanks Dictionary.com!

efficacy: capacity for producing a desired result or effect; effectiveness (230)

flagrante: very obvious; shameless (216)

customary: according to or depending on custom; usual; habitual (222)


Figurative Language:

Quote: 193- On top of a small hillock, in the shadow of an obelisk hat was once a geodesic marker, Senhor Jose looks around him as far as he can see, and he finds nothing but graves rising and falling with the curves of the land....

Analysis: Irony. Personification. Often Senhor Jose talks about the fact that buildings breathe and they rise and fall with their breath. I think it's ironic personification here, because of the fact that he is indirectly personalifying the graves as breathing beings.


Quote: 191- He would go in there in person to remind the fighters ironically that there was no point tearing their hair out over such minor matters during their lifetime, sinsce, sooner or later, they would all end up together in the cemetary bald as coots.

Analysis: Comic Relief. I think that this represents comic relief because death and fighting are such heavy subjects that the author decided to not depress his readers and throw them a bone.


Quote: "Now what explanation can you find for that, you'd have to ask the burglar, he must know, having said these words, Senhor Jose got up, i won't rob you of any more of your time.

Analysis: Irony. This is Senhor Jose admitting that he is the burglar.


Chapter Quote: The General Cemetery, with its banks of spontaneous vegetation, its flowers, its creepers, its dense bushes, its festoons and garlands, its nettles and its thistles, the powerful trees whose roots often dislodged tombstones and forced up into the sunlight a few startled bones.

Analysis: Metaphor. This reminds me of people who admit that they have skeletons in their closets.


Theme: Life and death. It's really all the same, thinks Senhor Jose, as well as the Registrar. They both believe in the fact that nothing is real, rather everything is imaginary.


Post B


Well, the book ended. Rather than give it away, I'll just tell you what I thought rather than what the words said. Let me first make sure you understand the first sentence of this paragraph- the book ended, but the story sure didn't. I don't know if I've met a more contraversial, undifinitive, totally surprising book than this. It's surprised me in many ways, quite a lot of ways that I ironically didn't expect to be surprised in. The shepherd in the story switched around the graves in the end, so that the ones who had killed themselves could never be found. How kind, and how sobering. I had never thought of it that way. Senhor Jose's thought process is that the dead are the dead and nothing will change that. But then again, mourners annot really tell the difference anyway, right? It's one earth, one cemetery, why not one ideal to weep for? The Registrar really changed too. He was the character who I thought might never become developed, but he did it himself, like characters do behind author's backs. Partially, I'm glad that this book is over, and partially, I wish it would go on. It's scary to find that I'm now alone with these ideas in my head. Who knows what I might do with them?