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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.
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
Desperation + Intrigue on reader
DRAMATISM
The difficulty of the surgery: two aneurysmas and one tumor
+
A neurosurgery that went wrong
• More information about the doctor. We get a sense of who he is and how he is.
• 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
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
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:
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
Looks like he is talking to himself
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
Present Tense: The Transition
Attention Catcher, powerful verbes