3.2. Stylistic Analysis

Filed under: 3.2. Stylistic Analysis,FIRST PAPER — epies2 at 10:54 pm on Saturday, November 6, 2010

For those who had heard the speech whether personally or in the radio, the speech was less touching than the one he pronounced in his first time in the House of Commons, Blood, toil, tears, and sweat some weeks before. The second speech was a longer and involving one and written with a complex prose. Churchill dealt with many different topics and it was read during half an hour. His defective diction, less evident in his first speech for being shorter and more concrete, was noticed by his audience and even more exaggerated from the radio. Undoubtedly, the Prime Minister was a great virtuous in writing but a deficient speaker, especially by the speaking fault mentioned above. However, he was a very down-to-earth person and he knew that apart from the House of Commons, people from lower classes were going to hear his words and so he used a natural and daily language to make every British know which his purposes were.

The most representative characteristic that Churchill left in this speech was the peroration, commonly used in his speeches, renowned in this case for making his audience feel confident towards war.

At the end of the speech, he radically changes the type of speech, now in verse, and uses different stylistic resources to fix in his audience’s mind the most legendary lines of his speech. It is a more prepared text, written with detail, to cause impact in whoever listened to it.

To start with, he uses anaphora, an effective stylistic figure consisting on the repetition of the first words of the line;

We shall go on to the end,
we shall fight in France,
we shall fight on the seas and oceans,
we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air,
we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be,
(…)

In the paragraph before the mentioned above, he already had started to change his language by introducing some sort of stylistic resources to prepare people’s mind before the final part arrived. One of these resources consisted on using the first part of the structure of a conditional sentence three different times in the same sentence, only separate by a comma:

I have, myself, full confidence that if all do their duty, if nothing is neglected, and if the best arrangements are made(…)

The he uses the same procedure but this time introducing three phrases by “to”:

we shall prove ourselves once again able to defend our Island home, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny

He also used asyndeton, characterized by putting together a series of phrases without joining them with any conjunction;

At any rate, that is what we are going to try to do. That is the resolve of His Majesty’s Government-every man of them. That is the will of Parliament and the nation.



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