The first narrative technique which I noticed is that it is all writtenin a third person narrative apart from the final line

believe that the author is trying to demonstrate the cycle of life through all the three paragraphs. The first paragraph is an extended description of birth. It portrays the emotions and thoughts felt from a parental point of view. The intrinsic human value of life is stressed and importantly the child is represented as its own entity ‘an independent being’ ‘no love or influence...could finally change ger’. The second paragraph seems to be a metaphor for life and its journey, he is said to be running just as we run through life but when one stops running or tries to turn back that is the end, which we know as death. The third paragraph is death because he physically stops running’ he [paused by the edge of the road’, the loss arrives in the form of his daughter.  The structure suggests the ephemorality of life, and the emotions are mirrored in the length of the paragraphs. The birth is the largest and most important because is it the beginning untainted and unsure. The journey s full of pain and is exhaustive and the death sudden and confusing. A point of real interest to me was in the last line ‘cest ma fils’ he said wrongly’ the word wrongly suggest what he said was incorrect. This could be due to a linguistic error in the French language but it appears to me that the error is because he has lost sight of his child’s independence. From Mary’s birth he considered her as an individual but with her death he grieves her as his daughter and his daughter only, he grieves his loss as a father and does not consider the loss to humanity. Faulks I believe interestingly tries to put the ideas of birth life and death out of the normal context of personal attachment and think of them in a global manner. Mary’s successful birth is described as ‘ another attempt undaunted unworn-down oblivious to the millions who had preceded her’ and ‘confronting the world’. This is not usually how the birth of child is viewed and that globalization of an intimate process could be a reason for the French setting to prove that not even geography can overcome these forces. The language in the fist paragrap hmirros the setting it is very clinsalc  ‘squeezed before hi eyes’ because a child is delivedered in the hospital the beauty is that the language talks of mary as thought she is an indepent being  quotes such as ‘respected, admired,…quality of otherness ‘ speak of the baby as its own person. The whole passage is powrufl because the fna line places empahasis on th tragefdd o f death in death we are only significant if someone lays laimt o us reason follows that the most catchartic point in the passage is when we reaise the girl was Mary annd the familial bond is revealed.until then it was just ‘the body of a girl’. Certain techniques such as alliteration of the B in ‘blue bloody’