The ‘Times’ article also puts emphasis into the uses of the narrator and of the man behind her. The story is in first person narrative format. The narrator tells the story exactly how she sees it through her own eyes. She tells of every vision, sound, emotion and feeling. The narrator adds life to the experience, telling us her thoughts and fears, “Oh my God! Had I got as high as that?” The other character in this piece is the man sitting behind her on the rollercoaster. He dissolves all her confidence in an instance when he tells her, “That’s the sc-a-a-a-riest seat”. He adds depth to the ambience of the experience.
In ‘Far from the Madding Crowd’, Hardy uses the contrast of light and dark to make the scene seem eerie. The light is described as “intertwined undulating snakes of green” embedded into the surrounding darkness. Another form of light is from the candle shining in Bathsheba’s bedroom. Also “a blue light appeared in the zenith”. The use of chiaroscuro is present here in presenting the dark form. The extract starts with light, but ends with black.
In ‘Far from the Madding Crowd’, the use of language and sentence structure has depth and profundity to it. The “dance of death” is the surreal supernatural description of the storm, with “skeleton… shaped with blue fire for bones”. The “dead, flat blow” reminds us the danger of the storm. The “mailed army” is a vision of a war against the elements. There are semantic clusters, like in death and battle. The writer uses superlatives to convey and craft his ideas, such as “most extra”,”wildest maddest”, and “unparalleled”. Hardy uses very dramatic vocabulary. He often uses personification, metaphors and similes. His sentence structure is strong, “heaven opened then indeed”. He has a strong use of discourse markers.
In ‘The Times’ article, the author uses vivid language that best describes her visions and feelings at the time. “And then the horizon vanished”. The story goes form a rather enjoyable and pleasant feeling to sudden chaos. The anxiety and fear of the writer, which was mildly present, totally changes once she begins to descend. The writer fears that she will faint, as she feels the safety bar will not hold her. There is a contrast between the use of language in the beginning and near the end. The sentence structure is normal, with roughly same amount of words in each sentence. She often uses personification, metaphors and similes to convey her experience. She has a strong use of discourse markers.
The structure of ‘Far from the Madding crowd’ is linear, ands follows on form beginning to middle to end in a very straightforward fashion.
The structure of ‘The Times’ piece is similar to that of ‘Far from the Madding Crowd’ in the way that it has a linear structure, but the main difference is that there are four segments. The first segment is before the rollercoaster, and then before and leading up to the pinnacle, then the “free fall” and leading to the end, then actually ending and getting off the rollercoaster.
