Analysis of the fragments from ‘The Passionate Year’ by James Hilton

Analysis of the fragments from ‘The Passionate Year’ by James Hilton

The fragments from ‘The Passionate Year’ written by English writer James Hilton is under our interpretation.

The problems of teacher and pupil are touched upon in these passages. Here we can read about the problem of a new teacher and how children rag him. But a teacher can have a strong will and won’t let his pupils make jokes at him, how to manage them.

The author of this story is omniscient, he goes through the psychological characterization, and using the third person narration, tells us a straight-form story about a young teacher, Kenneth Speed, who is the central character, who came to his new class and had been warned about the children’s possible misbehaviour. The story is set in a class-room and this is a realistic setting. The plot of the story is simple and the story is divided by the author to two parts: ‘Speed in class’ and ‘The conversation between Speed and Clanwell’. But I want to offer the further division: the first part can be subdivided to three more – ‘Speed’s expecting worse’, ‘Misbehaviour’ and ‘Punishment’. I think such a division of the story to logical parts was made to form the matches: the first sub-part is the opening, the second is the climax (the passage telling about laughter), and the third is the denouement. The last part which is separated by a line, is the closing paragraph added to the fragment of the story in order to come to the conclusion that the victory over the children was full and Speed had passed his ‘ordeal’.

At the beginning of the fragment Speed is in nervous condition which is expressed by the epithets: ‘nervous’, ‘an atmosphere of subdued expectancy’, ‘keenly conscious’; similes: ‘as if he were sitting on a powder-magazine <…>’. To show the atmosphere after Speed’s confusion with the names, the author uses rhetorical exclamatory sentence, even with inversion in it. And then goes Speed’s flashback to his past. Elliptical sentence (‘in hot indignation’) is used to show how really indignant Worsley was.

The closing paragraph contains metaphor (‘ordeal’). There are also repetitions in this extract of the word laughter (‘roared with laughter’, ‘went away laughing’ <…>). The tonal system of the story is ironic and humoristic, though there are some points of tense there.