The Prose In Flannery O Connor's The American Scholar

The prose taken from The American Scholar is a descriptive prose, literally explaining both the physical appearance of the biggest heart in the world and the function of a heart, while upon further analysis, the readers can find more connotations to those lines that all living creatures have one thing in common: a heart that is able to experience emotions of a kind- love. The author achieves those effects through a wide range of techniques from the use of metaphor, sentence structure, and language.

The author first humanizes the descriptive account of a whale to make further connection to humans. In the second and third lines of the prose, both similes and house metaphor are present: “as big as a room” and “as big as swinging doors in a
saloon”. The “room” leads the reader to a connotation of a big empty space, and that the heart of a whale is as spacy as a room, in fact, the author further justifies this by the use of italic word in the ‘is’ of “it is a room, with four chambers.” The use of the number “four” emphasizes a large quantity for “one” heart, signifying the large in size the whale heart is. Colloquial language is also illustrated in the “waaaaay” the author uses next to the adjective “bigger” to slow down the reading tempo enhancing its meaning; that the size of a whale is gigantic, and is helped by a further comparison to the “car”- a mechanical object that can carry passengers. The author also associates the whale’s life with the human life, this can be seen from “puberty” “diet” and “social life”- three strong dictions that clearly symbolize the lifestyle and the life cycle of human beings.

Another key idea is that the author attempts to show some connection between all things in nature, and that in reality one cannot control one’s emotion. The use of similar repeated sentence structure in paragraph two suggest that all creatures no doubt have one thing in common, that is the presence of a heart and the emotion it can carry. Although the “unicellular bacteria” have no hearts at all, they still have fluid, and all animals do have one too, suggesting that all living things have similarity in a way despite the differences. The author also visualizes that the heart functions all day and all night, proven in the sentence “So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment” that shows the presence of different times.

The author has moved from a scientific account in the first paragraph to a more emotive description in the last paragraph.
The last paragraph at the same time also represents the prose as a whole: the life lesson, exploration, and emotion of love. The readers learn that one cannot trust anyone and can only trust oneself, as supported by the sentence “we are utterly open with no one”. Furthermore, the listing of “not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend” emphasizes that not even the closest person can be trusted, and that one can only trust one’s heart. Another life lesson is shown in “when young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always”, meaning that when ones are all young, ones always believe in true love and the live-happily-ever-after stereotype, but in the end ones come to a realization that hearts can easily break in reality, and that true love may just be a fantasy. House metaphor is also presented by the “brick up” in the “you can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant”, and illustrating that even the strongest hearts can break, which is further justified by the run-on sentence using the repeated “and”s. The author then visualized some examples of emotion of love in the end to stimulate, engage, and communicate with the readers that the heart, a well-accepted common metaphor for emotion, reminds the readers of its
fragility.

In conclusion, the author connects scientific fact with emotive description to show the lack of knowledge of emotions despite scientific knowledge. The author has successfully portrayed that all living tings experience emotion of love that is unavoidable, uncontrollable, and natural at the same time, by the use of metaphor, sentence structure, and language. The readers can conclude that at some stage in our lives, we will all experience an emotion called ‘love’ and ‘heartbreaks’.