Analyse af Andre Agassis 'Open'

“Andre Agassi (b. 1970) is an American tennis player, who retired in 2006. He was one of the game's most dominant players from the early 1990s to the mid-2000s”

“Open” is an autobiography of Andre Agassi, the world famous tennis player. Agassi wrights about his childhood and the people that has played a big part in his upbringing. We meet his raging father, his reluctant mother, his mean grandmother, and his patient uncle. He gives us the story of how tennis became a big part of his life and how his upbringing has brought him to where he is today. Also, how tennis became ”the essence of his life”, and thats not a thing he suppresses with the many refrences to tennis that we get introduced to thougout the the hole novel.

Andre is only eight years old. But the fact that the past events are conveyed in the present tense further, increases the child narrator's authenticity. We believe every word he writes. And he helps the reader, by guiding us though the times of the events, this makes us empathize with him.

The autobiography starts out with a detailed description of Agassi’s grandmother. And already here it’s clear to see Agassi’s way of using irony and humor in his ways of describing people; which are always appealing to readers, for example “My mother says Grandma is homesick. The first time I hear this word I ask myself, How can you be sick about not being home? Home is where the dragon lives” The dragon is a character we meet multiple times throughout the extract, it’s a way of describing the grandma, the dragon. She got this name because of he way of being, and her cruel way of treating her family. “My father’s mother lives with us. She’s a nasty old lady from Tehran with a wart the size of a walnut on the edge of her nose”. Agassi paint us an image of how his grandmother’s looks and of her personality, mean, and old. We get to hear about how Agassi’s grandmother treated his father as a child. How she would beat him if he was behaving badly and how she would always undermine him. This could be a reasonable explanation to why Andre Agassi’s father is as tough as he is.