How To Understand The Word "death"

Table of contents:

How To Understand The Word "death"
How To Understand The Word "death"

Video: How To Understand The Word "death"

Video: How To Understand The Word "death"
Video: English Vocabulary - Death and Dying 2024, March
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Authors do not always use words in their original meaning. Metaphors, allegories, exaggerations - without them the text would be much more boring. However, this also has its drawbacks: sometimes the author flirts with connotations so much that even the word “death” becomes difficult to understand.

How to understand the word "death"
How to understand the word "death"

Instructions

Step 1

For realist writers, "death" is always taken literally. An excellent example of this is E. Hammingway with his classic novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. It is unlikely that you will find hidden meanings and deep subtext in the book - the author keeps his thought on the surface, expresses it in plain text. He does the same with the vocabulary of the heroes: the partisans are not up to philosophical reasoning, therefore, when they say that the character is killed, they mean exactly that.

Step 2

In many lyric works, "death" becomes a symbol. If we recall Fowles's novel The Collector, we find a completely different picture than that of the realists. The narrative is filled with thoughts that would not be so interesting if the author said them bluntly. Actually, the finale of the work is a kind of metaphor: the death of the main character is not at all an element of a thriller and not a whipping up of horror, this is an inevitable development of events for everything that the girl personifies. Here she is a symbol of everything sublime and spiritual, and her death also means the death of any art in the hands of “flat” people.

Step 3

Death can often be understood as “betrayal of one's own ideals”, “degradation”. So, for example, in everyday speech one can say: "NTV died as a TV channel." To paraphrase, it will turn out: "NTV used to be an excellent TV channel, but now it has become much worse." Actually, this is one of those metaphors that every student easily uses in everyday life.

Step 4

“Die” can also be understood as “morally obsolete”. The meaning is not far from "degradation", but there is a significant difference. Here we are not talking about the fact that the subject has become worse or better - the point is in absolute lack of demand. For example: "With the advent of electricity, the oil lamps died." Those. lamps turned out to be unnecessary due to the fact that they were replaced by more convenient counterparts.

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