Analyse af Susan Cheevers essay 'My Little Bit of Country'

Everyone remembers where they grew up. Most people can recall the senses, spirit, atmosphere and feeling of childhood when they’re homebound. Whether you lived on the country side or in the city when you were coming of age, you will most likely associate your home with peace, quiet and cosmos. In the essay “My Little Bit of Country”, the writer, Susan Cheever, describes her upbringing in Manhattan and outside the city. In the following content, it will be exposed how Cheever’s significant imagery and rhetorical features that help her painting a picture of both living in the city and on the countryside come to show. Furthermore, the paper contains a comment on cause of the partiality most people have to their hometown.

To categorize Susan Cheever’s type of essay, on would argue that it, above all, is an informal essay. This comes clear as you intensely sense the personality of the writer through the language, descriptions and standpoints that come to show. This is exemplified shortly after the opening of the essay. “At the zoo we were always greeted by our good friend Joe, who happened to be a chimpanzee. (…) My favorite animal at the zoo (…) was the ancient yak” (p. 1, l. 10) As she continuously implicates herself and her own personal preferences and familiarities in her language, it is quite uncomplicated to state that it is an informal essay. Additionally, one might classify the essay as a narrative and descriptive essay. The argument in favour of the essay being narrative is the fact that it contains various traits of a story. Cheever builds up her essay around a tale with a beginning, an end and a focal point that go through a personal development. “As I grew up and married and my children grew up, the park continued to be my refuge for long walks and my weekend house, my family skating rink, my tennis court (…)” (p. 3, l. 188) The descriptive part of the essay comes to show as she by means of imagery and thorough descriptions paints a picture of the city as a contrast to the countryside. “I could wander all I wanted in the suburban woods and try to be interested in the skunk cabbage that bloomed in the spring (…) and the jelly blobs of a frog’s eggs in the pond, but none of it held a candle to the magnificent variety of the Conservatory Garden or even the rolling land around Cleopatra’s needle.”(p. 3, l. 145) In this excerpt, the reader receives an exhaustive picture of the suburbs in contradistinction to the city.