LANGUAGE ANALYSIS - PAST PAPER QUESTION

DR. ZINC

My friends had advised me, if I was at a loose end and required entertainment, to wander down to the public gardens to see Dr. Zinc in action. When I got there I saw a bizarre, cadaverous figure, gesticulating wildly at a small audience that had gathered around him. He behaved in a theatrical manner, intoning some well-prepared soliloquy and throwing himself around like a tree in a gale. He wore a melancholy expression and his straggly hair hung down untidily. I joined the crowd to hear what this eccentric fellow had to say.

Re-read the descriptions of:
Dr. Zinc in paragraph 1
Explain the effects the writer creates by using these descriptions. Support your answer by selecting words and phrases from these paragraphs.

Broadly, Dr. Zinc comes across as a strange and hyperbolized person. The writer describes him to be ‘eccentric’ and a ‘bizarre, cadaverous figure’. The word ‘eccentric’ implies to unusualness and ties in with ‘bizarre’ which creates a sense of abnormality or oddity. ‘Cadaverous’ suggest that Dr. Zinc was extremely thin and almost skeletal like which again shows an exaggerated and unrealistic feature. His behavior is amplified and overstated when the writer describes him to be ‘gesticulating wildly’ in a ‘theatrical manner’. ‘Gesticulating’ yet again augments exaggeration and ‘theatrical’ creates an image of an actor in the mind’s eye. The writer further describes his body language in using ‘like a tree in a gale’. There is an overall image of magnified body movements, maybe even amusingly so. The word ‘intoning’ connotes a sense of repetitive chanting, which is almost like a priest reciting a prayer. The ‘straggly hair’ hints a sense of untidiness and dishevelment.