“Comentario de Textos en Lengua Inglesa”

Textual Commentary 1 Resubmission

23th June

‘The Catch’ analysis

The fragment for textual commentary belongs to the short story ‘The Catch’ written by

Nadine Gordimer and included in the volume The Soft Voice of the Serpent (1952). ‘The

Catch’ is a story in which the author portrays racial problems in South Africa in times of

colonialism. ‘The Catch’ is set in a beach resort near Durban where a young white couple

from Johannesburg go for their holidays. During their stay, they met an Indian fisherman that

became their friend, this relationship is a way to escape from their quotidian life and world

(Gibbs, 2018).

Moving to specific textual observations, we identify salient lexical repetitions. In this excerpt,

it is found several repetitions such as ‘thank you’ (1-2), ‘smiled’ (3-5). There are also

repetitions of the verb ‘laugh’ in the whole text that produces a sensation of cohesion in the

fragment, in contrast with the verb ‘cried’ (13). Also ‘The things we get ourselves into!’ (7)

is a reference to a situation that occurred before, because of that it contributes to the cohesion

of the text.

Another question in the fragment is the sense of time that it is possible to see with the verbs

in past tense. In the text the verbs appear in past tense such as ‘kept’ (1), ‘smiled’ (3), ‘shook’

(8) or ‘said’ (14). These verbs create a sensation of past events.

On the other hand, the narrator is another important issue in this commentary: the narrator is

a third-person omniscient narrator who talks about in the third person and knows the feelings

and thoughts of the characters such as ‘she said’ (7). Personal pronouns are also proof of this

narration in third person ‘he/him’ or ‘she/her’.

To bring this essay to a close, it is important to highlight the structure of the text that is

characteristic of a narrative text because of the time in which it is narrated, the extension, the

third person omniscient narrator and the opinions such as ‘some chord of hysteria’ in line 11.