2.3 Syntactical expressive means and stylistic devices as dominating in Neil Gaiman’s horror comics-tale “Baby Cakes”

Neil Gaiman’s story "Babies" is a horror story about the dark side of the human personality. Despite the fact that the story is very short and represented in a form of comics, it highlights the terrible human nature and striving for "adaptation". People who for some reason have lost their animals, decide that this is not a reason to change the way of life and start using babies for the same purposes as the animals: consume as a food, testing dangerous drugs and chemicals and dressing into their skin. After all, according to most, babies is not a conscious being, they can not speak and barely move. However, at the end of the story babies also disappear. The work ends with the words "But we'll think of something. Humans are smart. It's what makes us superior to the animals and the babies. We'll figure something out."

That story creates an oppressive atmosphere and makes a reader to muse upon the human attitude to animals, to people and upon the human’s ability to adjust. Because under favorable circumstances these fictional events can easily become a reality, a frightening reality.

ВСЕ ПРИМЕРЫ ДОЛЖНЫ БЫТЬ КУРСИВОМ

The story is told in the first person, but instead of single "I" the author uses plural "we", thereby showing himself as equal with the majority, not condemning, but simply stating. In the story there are no dates, historical events or other hints of time or place of the events described.

If we take a look at the manner of presentation, we can see that the situation described with short, unextended sentences. Most of the events, emotions, and descriptions shown by verbs: "We missed them". "And we used them". "Some of them we tested".

On this basis, we can say that syntactic stylistic means prevail in this story. The very first sentence is an example of inversion : "A few years back all of the animals went away".

Also, in the text we can see two repetition:

• “… that was no reason to change our lives. No reason to change our diets…”;

• “We don’t know where they went. We don’t know what we’re going to do without them.”

There also can be found a rhetorical question : “With the Animals gone, what else could we do?” and parenthesis : “It was hard, of course, but necessary”.

Anyway, the text is mostly full of parallel constructions. These stylistic means sets out the facts by forcing the atmosphere and in a short and concise form. Thus we see that all animals have left humanity - "No cats or rabbits, no dogs or whales, no fish in the seas, no birds in the skies". This technique is also used when describing the terrible attitude to babies: "We scarred them and scalded them. We burn them. We clamped them and planted electrodes into their brains. We grafted, and we froze and we irradiated."

Semasiological figures of speech are represented by epithets. Although, these are usually shown in the text as associative words. For instance: words “rational”, “thinking” concerning the babies or “soft”, “comfortable” – concerning the babies’ skin. Even though, such epithets can be hardly found in the text.

So, concluding this analysis it can be claimed, that the author used mostly syntactical expressive means and stylistic devices to reach the terrifying communicative effect on a reader. Moreover, personally I would presume that the horror element in this story is reached by making a reader to become thoughtful of how monstrous can a human be. This supports my idea, that the author didn’t need to use a lot of colorful semasiological expressive means or stylistic devices, he expressed his idea through the contest and usage of syntactical figures of speech.

НУ В ОБЩЕМ ХОРОШО. ТОЛЬКО МАЛОВА-ТО ПРАКТИЧЕСКОЙ ЧАСТИ. НАДО ЕЩЕ СТРАНИЦ 5 ДОПИСАТЬ. ДАЙТЕ БОЛЬШЕ ПРИМЕРОВ, ЕЩЕ КАКОЙ-ТО ИНФОРМАЦИИ НУЖНО ДОБАВИТЬ ПО ГРАММАТИКЕ ТЕКСТА. ПЛЮС С ВАС ЕЩЕ ВЫВОДЫ ОСНОВНЫЕ И ВСТУПЛЕНИЕ.