Commentary on The Nine Tailors

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WL Commentary Natasha Frost                                                Mrs Noyes

The Nine Tailors – Dorothy L. Sayers

In this piece of prose, the protagonist has climbed up to the ringing chamber and finds himself alone with the clanging of the bells. Wanting not ‘to hear anymore’, he finds the bells unbearable as they rip at his eardrums and thus is forced to leave. Sayers uses a combination of literary techniques and particular emotive language to create an effect of disaster and disarray which correlates with the idea of the unstable character as portrayed by the first sentence (‘Wimsey did not want to hear anymore.’)

The first paragraph is littered with figurative speech and personification: the writer makes the bells seem angry and desperate through the use of metaphor through personification. The bells’ ‘frenzied call’ is mentioned, which conduces with the idea of desperation and madness. The tone shifts slightly throughout the paragraph as the bells go from being merely insane to ragingly angry ‘the brazen fury of the bells.’ From this, we are given the idea that the bells are working against Wimsey and that they are against him and thus attempting to hurt him, as Sayers compares them to the ‘blows from a thousand beating hammers.’ The bells seem to be upsetting everything within this passage: the writer uses the objective correlative to show how upset Wimsey feels when she mentions that the very tower is staggering ‘like a drunken man’. This figurative speech continues throughout the text and into the second paragraph with Sayers again using similes (‘..like a sword in the brain..’, ‘the blood [..] seemed to rush to his head’) to show the way in which Wimsey is being shaken by this experience. Line 13 is quite different from the fairly short and regular sentences used throughout the text as Sayers uses a long stream of adjectives to convey the pain and stress that the protagonist is experiencing: this seems to draw out the aggravation and relates to the ‘one high note, shrill and sustained’ mentioned in line 9. The constant figurative terms help to create this image of madness and insanity as Wimsey’s world is shaken and stirred: the words are emotive and thus work to place the reader in the belfry with Wimsey.

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The text reaches its climax in the second paragraph. While the first paragraph effectively sets the scene and tells the reader what is going on and a little background to the situation, the second is purely an expression of the desperation and catastrophe experienced by the character. It is a very long paragraph compared to the beginning and end and thus helps the reader to understand the way in which this experience in the belfry seems to be eternal. The sentences become longer and more complicated and the text becomes wordier and harder to get through. Sayers uses semi-colons and ...

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