icon

Usetutoringspotscode to get 8% OFF on your first order!

Oroonoko, or the Royal slave (Analysis)

Write an essay of no more than 1,500 words in which you analyse the passage below, addressing the following:
1.What kinds of narrative techniques are used?
2.What are the distinctive features of the language?
3.How does context help to illuminate your understanding of the extract? You may want to limit your focus to one particular context or comment on any that strike you as relevant.
In this voyage Caesar begot so good an understanding between the Indians and the English that there were no more fears or heartburnings during our stay, but we had a perfect, open and free trade with them. Many things remarkable and worthy reciting we met with in this short voyage, because Caesar made it his business to search out and provide for our entertainment, especially to please his dearly adored Imoinda, who was a sharer in all our adventures; we being resolved to make her chains as easy as we could, and to compliment the prince in that manner that most obliged him.

As we were coming up again, we met with some Indians of strange aspects, that is, of a larger size and other sort of features than those of our country. Our Indian slaves that rowed us asked them some questions, but they could not understand us, but showed us a long cotton string with several knots on it, and told us, they had been coming from the mountains so many moons as there were knots. They were habited in skins of a strange beast, and brought along with them bags of gold dust, which, as well as they could give us to understand, came streaming in little small channels down the high mountains when the rains fell; and offered to be the convoy to anybody, or persons, that would go to the mountains. We carried these men up to Parham, where they were kept till the Lord Governor came. And because all the country was mad to be going on this golden adventure, the governor by his letters commanded (for they sent some of the gold to him) that a guard should be set at the mouth of the River of Amazons (a river so called, almost as broad as the river of Thames), and prohibited all people from going up that river, it conducting to those mountains of gold. But we going off for England before the project was further prosecuted, and the governor being drowned in a hurricane, either the design died or the Dutch have the advantage of it. And it is to be bemoaned what His Majesty lost by losing that part of America.

Though this digression is a little from my story, however, since it contains some proofs of the curiosity and daring of this great man, I was content to omit nothing of his character.

(From Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, p. 60)

Please use sources from ‘The renaissance and Long Eighteenth Century’ Open university book edited by Anita Pacheco and David Johnson

its mainly looking at the passage above and analysing it.

Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

Comments are closed.

Powered by WordPress | Designed by: Premium WordPress Themes | Thanks to Themes Gallery, Bromoney and Wordpress Themes