Hod 1 PejHod IB English 12 A Commentary: The Crow Road The passage from The Crow Road by Ian Banks

is jarringly contrasting to the typical account given during a funeral procession. The excerpt is written with a pervasive tone of amusement, jumping out as an effectively wonderful, yet unusual grabber to Banks novel. Gifted with bizarre diction, the narrator is established as an unruly youngster who spends more time observing the environment and people around him, than the occasion that brought them there in the first place. The narrator absently notices that the characters physical coalition is juxtaposed by their emotional absence, each separated and operating in their own dimension. This passage jumps in with a unique start, exaggerating bombastically that grandmother exploded, two words no individual would want to stumble upon in the same sentence. This outspoken style reiterates that this is a passage dictated by a teenager. This is a teenager most emphatically familiar with the pop culture of our time period, a facet that easily devalues violence. However, the author makes a subtle association, the narrator felt a pang of loss that did not entirely belong to my recently departed grandmother, yet was connected with her memory. This pang is felt when his mother silently talks to his father. The narrator recognizes that he has become isolated and this isolation digs into his core; his memory of his grandmother evokes certain emotional feelings. These are slight gestures of the woman theyve lost.

Hod 2 The narrator goes throughout the procession describing his distinctive family: his non-secular dad who is seemingly distressed by the playing religious music, his brother apparently unsettled and found fiddling his single earring, his mother brandishing a UFO hat and black garb, Aunt Antonia has her hair colored completely pink, and even he, taking two entire paragraphs to define his hoodlum exterior and the time he had taken to establish it, is seen inadvertently dressed with one black sock, one white. The characters differ from each other, but share one similar trait, theyre all squirming either mentally or physically. The death of his grandmother has connected them together, but this assembly is unsettling to their perhaps selfish characteristics. The procession is out of their norm of life and this troubles them. This passage incorporates the usage of several symbols. The first symbols are the colors white and black. The passage hints at black being attributed to death and white to life. The best examples are the narrators mothers coat and hat, both black and arranged for the procession, and the narrators own clothing. The narrators apparel contains a mixture of black and white, within itself symbolizing the Tao concept of yin yang, polar opposites that are ever so interconnected. The mixture expresses his adolescent appeal; youth alludes to full of life, slightly recognizing the crawling of death. The narrator pushes through the funeral apathetically, distracted by the current world around him. He is characterized as strict follower of the power of now, but just as the rest of his family, still keeps himself detached from the

Hod 3 environment hes inside of. It is quite clear that it take more than grief to bring this detached family together.

Word Count: 520