Don T Let The Scissors Analysis

Don’t Let the Scissors Cut You

The tone of the memoir Running with Scissors is best epitomized by a single quote from the book: “The problem with not having anybody to tell you what to do, I understood, is that there was nobody to tell you what not to do.” (264) The author, Augusten Burroughs, throughout the novel, wasn’t sure if his life was the one he wanted, which he expressed through his persistently negative and casual diction, his hard to follow chronological organization, and his highly expressive imagery.
Augusten Burroughs never had a normal life, and that affected his outlook on the world, which in turn affected his choice of diction in the novel. Augusten started life with an alcoholic father and insane mother who fought constantly
Figurative language shows how his brain works and what he thinks of everything around him and whether he appreciates it or wants it to be different. “My mother sighed. As she exhaled she seemed to shrink into the chair. Even her perfume seemed to fade. She looked at her hands, turning them over in front of her face like they were misplaced artifacts she had pulled from the earth. Then she looked at me. She leaned forward and whispered, ‘without Dr. Finch, your father will kill us. Dr. Finch is the only person in the world who can save us.’” (52, 53) The figurative language in this quote shows how drastically his mother looked like she was fading…shrinking…dying. She looked at her hands like they weren’t hers, like they were something she didn’t understand. She was going through a lot of mental trouble, which was all summed up with the figurative language. Another rhetorical device that shows up in the novel Running with Scissors is the one which shows up most often: sarcasm. Augusten is constantly sarcastic, along with everyone around him, showing they all have generally bad attitudes towards everything that happens to them. For Augusten, this is because he doesn’t know if he’s happy with his life. “I took inventory of my life: I was seventeen, I had no formal education, no job training, no money,
This tone in the memoir Running with Scissors was expressed by the author’s use of negative and borderline rude diction, his occasionally hard to follow chronological organization, the fact that the book was written for the author himself and his constant use of figurative language, sarcasm, and detailed imagery. From page 258, “Freedom was what we had. Nobody told us when to go to bed. Nobody told us to do our homework. Nobody told us we couldn’t drink two six-packs of Budweiser and then throw up in the Maytag. So why did we feel so trapped? Why did I feel like I had no options in my life when it seemed that options were the only thing I did