Unfamiliar text ll Text #3

Text 3 - "The Cellist of Sarajevo"

By: Steven Galloway

1. Define 3 words you do not know

Charred - burnt and blackened
Besieged - (a place) surrounded by armed forces aiming to capture it or force surrender
Inviolable - never to be broken, infringed or dishonored  

2. Identify 3 examples of emotive language (words or phrases that evoke some kind of emotion in the reader)

"He would very much like to feel his father's hand on his shoulder again."

"The war will go around him as he sits in the small crater left at the mortar's point of impact. He'll play Albinoni's Adagio. He''ll do this every for twenty-two days, a day for each person killed."

"It wasn't always like this."

3. What is the tone of the excerpt (author’s attitude towards what he is writing about) and what mood does this suggest (overall feeling of the text)?

- a melancholic mood

4. Identify an example of imagery from the passage (when something is described in vivid detail, making it easy to imagine) and explain its effect on the reader. How effective do you find it?

"It screamed downward, splitting air and sky without effort. A target expanded in size, bought into focus by time and velocity. There was a moment before impact that was the last instant of things at they were. Then the visible world exploded." As a reader, this example of imagery definitely made me feel somewhat hopeless. Just imagining a missile darting from the sky while going on about your day made me realized there are things that sneaks up on us that we would never expect. I find this language feature very effective from its diction to the combinations of words to create a vivid picture.

5. Personal reflections

This excerpt gives a dark flow yet a hear-warming feeling. It's incredibly amazing how the cellist commemorate for the dead during the midst of war.