One of the simplest ways to talk with the text is to interrogate it—to ask questions. Remember that we’re always trying to consider the choices writers make, so as you read, ask yourself why they chose the words or sentence patterns they did. You don’t always need to know the answers to your questions; sometimes just asking them will give you insights into a writer’s choices.
Let’s take a look at this excerpt from Ralph Ellison’s “On Bird, Bird-Watching and Jazz,” an essay in which the writer considers the legend—and style—of jazz saxophonist and composer Charlie Parker, nicknamed Yardbird. In the essay, which was published in the Saturday Review in 1962, Ellison refers to both Robert Reisner’s Bird: The Legend of Charlie Parker (a collection of interviews of Parker’s friends, family, and colleagues) and Roger Tory Peterson’s A Field Guide to the Birds (the bird-watcher’s bible) as he comments on jazz as art and examines the myths surrounding Parker’s nickname.
from On Bird, Bird-Watching and Jazz
Ralph Ellison
Oddly enough, while several explanations are advanced as to how Charles Parker, Jr., became known as “Bird” (“Yardbird,” in an earlier metamorphosis), none is conclusive. There is, however, overpowering internal evidence that whatever the true circumstance of his ornithological designation, it had little to do with the chicken yard. Randy roosters and operatic hens are familiars to fans of the animated cartoons, but for all the pathetic comedy of his living—and despite the crabbed and constricted character of his style—Parker was a most inventive melodist, in bird-watcher’s terminology, a true songster.
This failure in the exposition of Bird’s legend is intriguing, for nicknames are indicative of a change from a given to an achieved identity, whether by rise or fall, and they tell us something of the nicknamed individual’s interaction with his fellows. Thus, since we suspect that more of legend is involved in his renaming than Mr. Reisner’s title indicates, let us at least consult Roger Tory Peterson’s Field Guide to the Birds for a hint as to why, during a period when most jazzmen were labeled “cats,” someone hung the bird on Charlie. Let us note too that “legend” originally meant “the story of a saint,” and that saints were often identified with symbolic animals.
Two species won our immediate attention, the goldfinch and the mockingbird—the goldfinch because the beatnik phrase “Bird lives,” which, following Parker’s death, has been chalked endlessly on Village1 buildings and subway walls, reminds us that during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries a symbolic goldfinch frequently appeared in European devotional paintings. An apocryphal story has it that upon being given a clay bird for a toy, the infant Jesus brought it miraculously to life as a goldfinch. Thus the small, tawny-brown bird with a bright red patch about the base of its bill and a broad yellow band across its wings became a representative of the soul, the Passion and the Sacrifice. In more worldly late-Renaissance art, the little bird became the ambiguous symbol of death and the soul’s immortality. For our own purposes, however, its song poses a major problem: it is like that of a canary—which soul or no soul, rules the goldfinch out.
The mockingbird, Mimus polyglottos, is more promising. Peterson informs us that its song consists of “long successions of notes and phrases of great variety, with each phrase repeated a half dozen times before going on to the next,” that mockingbirds are “excellent mimics” who “adeptly imitate a score or more species found in the neighborhood,” and that they frequently sing at night—a description which not only comes close to Parker’s way with a saxophone but even hints at a trait of his character. For although he usually sang at night, his playing was characterized by velocity, by long-continued successions of notes and phrases, by swoops, bleats, echoes, rapidly repeated bebops—I mean rebopped bebops—by mocking mimicry of other jazzmen’s styles, and by interpolations of motifs from extraneous melodies, all of which added up to a dazzling display of wit, satire, burlesque and pathos. Further, he was as expert at issuing his improvisations from the dense brush as from the extreme treetops of the harmonic landscape, and there was, without doubt, as irrepressible a mockery in his personal conduct as his music.
(1962)
Reread the excerpt, and see what you notice on a second reading. Jot down questions as you go, asking why Ellison might have used the language he did.
Here are some questions about Ellison’s style that might come to mind, based on first and second impressions of the passage:
You may notice that these questions fall into the two categories we talked about in relation to the John Muir selection: the choice of words (diction) and the way the words are arranged (syntax). When we talk about diction, we might look for interesting or powerful vocabulary, but we also consider figures of speech like metaphors, similes, personification, and hyperbole. When we consider syntax, we want to notice interesting constructions like parallelism, juxtaposition, and antithesis, along with sentence types such as compound, complex, periodic, inverted, cumulative, and imperative, among others. We also might look at the pacing of a piece of work: Does the writer reveal details quickly or slowly? How does he or she build suspense?
Here are some questions to ask when you analyze diction:
When you analyze syntax, you might ask:
These questions do not have simple yes or no answers. They lend themselves to discussion, but as you discuss them, be sure you can support your ideas with evidence from the text. Coming up with answers to questions like these will put you well on your way toward analyzing an author’s style and how that style helps the author make his or her point.