Mother`s Day

The analysis of the text from Arakin’s book, the 2nd course

How we kept Mother’s Day

1. Let us begin with analysis of the text. The discourse pattern should be characterized first as a completed story by a well – known Canadian writer Steven Leacock. As far as we know, this writer is famous for such works as “Nonsense Novels”, “Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town”, “My Remarkable Uncle” and others.

2. The author titles his work as “How we kept Mother’s day”. It is done explicitly, so we can predict the contents of the text rather easily. Perhaps some family tells about the celebration of Mother’s day, because it’ a family holiday.

3. We should also remark here that it is a short story with all the properties of belles-lettres style. The story is told in the first person. The author chooses the narrative form for telling the plot, but there are some dialogues as well.

4. The place of action is done explicitly. The author shows a definite place with the help of such key-words and phrases as “I stayed home from college classes”, “into the country”, “to go fishing”, “a lovely restful day around the house”.

So we can suppose that the action takes place at home, then at the bank of the river. There аre some indications to the time of action. We can see that the story begins some days before Mother’s day, and lasts till the end of Mother’s day.

5. There can be no doubt that the author provides us with a full and illustrative description of the main characters. The main figures of the discourse are the mother and the father. We can dwell on their traits of character with the help of the word expressions the author uses:

The description of Mother: “She seemed really like her old grey bonnet”; “She always does it [decorates the house] at Xmas”; “Mother had to go up and down, fetching the things back and forward”, and so on. So we can say that she is so devoted to her family, but doesn’t think about herself at all.

The description of Father: “Father had bought silk ties for himself and boys to remember Mother by”; “It occurred to Father that …it would be better … to take her [Mother] fishing. …he had just got a new rod”; “We knew he would make trouble”. These sentences show us that he always gets some benefit even if it’s