Analyse af 'A ride on the New York subway'

The subway is the center of transport, only the people who push the most may enter. It is a personal essay which means the narrator is a 1st person narrator. We see the subway threw her eyes, and her perspective. While she is standing on the subway, she compares the people around her with wild animals, fighting primitively to get on the iron monster. She compares the train to an iron monster as a symbol of how the industrialization is taking over, and is a part of our everyday lifestyle. Even though we humans see ourselves as a superior species, we are still acting like primitive beings. In the essay she starts her story by saying:” The New York subways are…a kind of Kafkaesque parallel to the life that is lived above ground…” by saying that she says that the New York subway is almost surreal and absurd, and the fact that people are acting like wild animals is almost unrealistic.

Figurative language makes it easier to understand and see the narrator’s thoughts. She uses irony, intertextuality, and adjectives to describe the environment. The way she writes in figurative language, makes the reader see the awful world she sees. The way she exaggerates her description by for example instead of saying people are standing close to each other she says that they are standing eyeball to eyeball, breath to breath. Which makes us feel uncomfortable by “standing” so close to another person. In the text she says people “willingly” goes into the train, and becomes its prisoners, while it takes you down to hell, she also refers to the bible by comparing this with Jonah and the whale, where he “willingly” tumble into the whale.