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Transcript

Mrs. Kelly's Monster

Summary

Pulitzer Prize in feature writing in 1979

The author followed a brain surgeon on a 57 years woman named Edna Kelly

Mrs. Kelly shared her skull with a monster: "a tangled knot of abnormal blood vessels in the back of her brain"

She couldn't bear the pain and decided to be operated in a very risky surgery.

By: Luis Casal, Cristina Suárez, Mónica Timón and Alejandra García

Ending

Dicotomy with the beginning: Mrs. Kelly wakes up happy, determined, thinking that she will go through the operation and kill "the monster". However, the ending shows it was impossible to save her. Ducker was also determined - Positivity vs Negativity

DRAMATISM

Into the text...

Structure

Desperation + Intrigue on reader

DRAMATISM

  • Chronological order. From general (6:30) to specific (12:53)
  • Why ? Because story is diven by action and action is driven by time

  • Show, don't tell

  • Present tense --> Increase speed action and drama. Immediacy.
  • Not much quotes, since the story is focused on ACTION

  • SOUNDS

  • Foreshadowing things to create tension (Ducker's hand cannot shake)

  • Repetitions to increase dramatic tension

  • Short paragraphs and short, direct sentences <--> operation atmosphere

Controlling idea

The Author

  • Jon Franklin was born in 1943
  • Has won the Pulitzer Prize two times at The Baltimore Sun
  • Ms. Kelly's Monster (1979. Inaugural Feature Writing)
  • The Mind Fixers (1985. Explanatory Journalism)
  • University of Maryland writing professor emeritus and is at work on a novel

ECG

Hook

70

The difficulty of the surgery: two aneurysmas and one tumor

bpm

+

Surgeons have our lives on their hands but they can fail

A neurosurgery that went wrong

Dialogues

Distance

• More information about the doctor. We get a sense of who he is and how he is.

  • Some descriptions humanize him: surgeons have our lives on their hands but, at the end, they are humans anyway, they can fail, and this is an example of this failure.

• The author describes his ordinary lunch, how his wife prepared it for him… It’s anyone’s life.

• Doctors will continue operating even if a patient dies

“The idea was not to capture her words. As time went on in the story I used fewer and fewer quotes. There’s nothing magic about quotes. Dialogue is a whole different matter”. - Jon Franklin

Close distance

but as an observer

Author

Readers

Thank You!

Background

Descriptions

Describes people by their actions (Mrs. Kelly facing the monster, Dr. Ducker operating although it is risky)

We experience the story as if it was live reporting: Franklin tells it in present tense, sound by sound, image by image.

The descriptions are not only based on visual images (the exhausted gaze of the surgeon...) but also on sound (the pop, pop, pop of the heart monitor...)

Franklin repeatedly says 70 beats per minute. This showed that Mrs. Kelly is still alive.

The Importance of documentation

The 'Story through the Pain'

The issue of the distance

Distance

At the very end Franklin does not straight say “she died” he says “the monster won” which means the same.

Kind of unsentimental and cold writing. The descriptions are rigorous and quite poetic :

Less about the patient, more about the brain, the surgery and its risks.

-Medium distance. In fact, we know the author is there as he is talking to the characters:

HOWEVER

some of the data he provides so the reader can follow the story are given in a way that we literallly see it from the doctor's point of view

Sources

Looks like he is talking to himself

Plus...

He is so good at descriptions that allows the reader to get into Mrs. Kelly's brain, the OP, the surgeon mind and the whole situation

Close-distance with reader

  • Background on O.R and hospital stuff because he wrote a book on shock trauma.

  • He observed the whole surgery, took notes of what he saw.

  • After writing the draft, he called Dr. Ducker for aproval: “Well Jon, that’s pretty much the way it was.”

  • Some parts were reconstructed (breakfast, lunch...)

Beginning

Speech

Present Tense: The Transition

  • Takes into account that readers may not be familiar with technical words
  • Explains unfamiliar terms before they appear at the climax of the story, because that would break the tension

  • Antropomorphization --> The tumor is the main character

  • Precise terms. He takes very much into account word's connotations (landscape, for example)

  • Action verbs since the beggining (1st verb = rises)

Attention Catcher, powerful verbes

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