Essay on "The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole"

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Essay on “The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole”

In “The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole” we can find many examples of how Sue Townsend uses Adrian’s language to reflect an image of his personality.  When reading the diary, I found that Adrian has many characteristics in his way of being, as any other person would; only that Adrian makes them evident through his writing.

There are certain features of Adrian’s personality that are striking by just reading several lines from any part of the book.  When Adrian is writing his New Year’s resolutions, I found that he doesn’t have a “genuine” lexis; he uses a lot of clichéd terms from society, such as “I will help the blind across the road” or “I will help the poor and ignorant”.  Sue Townsend uses this to give signs that Adrian takes ideas or concepts from the outside world and uses them as his own.  To a certain extent, it also shows his lack of originality.  She then makes this more evident by Adrian’s sudden changes in register when talking about a certain event; When talking about school lunches, the first thing he says is “School dinners are completely crap now”, this is typical language of a teenager, but he then finishes the paragraph with something quite formal he probably heard from someone else “It won’t be our fault if we grow up apathetic and lacking in moral fibre”.  This is the type of thing you would probably hear from his head teacher and not from Adrian.  His goal is to sound intellectual, yet he makes it evident that he is trying too hard and that the language he is using is not completely his.  This is the basis for Adrian Mole’s idiolect.

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Sue Townsend uses Adrian’s characteristic clichés and changes in register to form his idiolect.  When Adrian goes on a trip to see his mother in Sheffield he describes the people on the train while he is looking for a seat; He first describes the image of smokers: “All the filthy smokers were crammed together choking and coughing.  They were a rough-looking, noisy lot so I hurried through their small carriage holding my breath” This is a very negative image, and the use of language is quite aggressive, he is also basing his description on a “smoker stereotype” he probably ...

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