Analysis Of Ian Frazier's Taking The F

When I flipped through the page of the Norton Reader, I would stop at random pages, read the title, and debate whether it’d be interesting or not. I read about three or four titles that were probably interesting but didn’t peak my interest. Taking a turn at the front pages of the book, I stop at page 154. I read the title, “Taking the F” by Ian Frazier. Now this sounds like an interesting essay. I mean he title could say anything, so I scanned the first paragraph to see what the essay would be about and spotted “Brooklyn, New York. Now the title makes sense; it is about traveling through Brooklyn on the F train. The title still wasn’t a clear connection to the point of the author’s essay. The author instead uses his five senses to describe

Frazier’s use of detail becomes apparent when rereading the essay. Each moment he describes himself traveling through Brooklyn is so explicitly detailed that his tone and language and layout of the essay starts to become apparent. Frazier detailed description gives the readers a feel of Brooklyn’s environment and the people that create it. When he talks about the bad things he sees in Brooklyn he states in the first sentence, “Brooklyn, New York, as the undefined, hard-to–remember the shape of a stain.” Then he continues to describe where he lives leading up to the F train in his neighborhood. He talks about the street and corner he lives on, “ I live on the edge of Park Slope, neighborhood by the crest of a low ridge that runs through the borough.” From there he continues to talk about the environment in his area. The sound of the planes that fly over his building, the touch of the shadow the plane makes, and the feel of the train makes when shaking his building. The next scene he takes us on is when he is on the F train, “Once a woman… pulled a knife. I remember the knife – it is flat,

Just look at the quote I gave you earlier: “Brooklyn, New York, as the undefined, hard-to–remember the shape of a stain.” He sees it as nothing but a stain on the map. He goes on to talk about “…the sludge at the bottom of the canal causes it to bubble.” Giving us something we can see, something we can hear because you can just imagine being near the canal and hearing the sludge bubble make their popping noises as the gas is released. He “The train sounds different – lighter, quieter—in the open air,” when it comes from underground and the sight he sees on the rooftops. Although some are negative, such as the sagging of roofs and graffiti, his tone towards the moment seems to be admiration. In the second section, he talks about the smells of Brooklyn and the taste of food. He’d talk about how his daughter compares the tastes of pizzas with her “…stern judgments of pizza. Low end… New Hampshire pizza. … In the middle… zoo pizza. …very top… two blocks from our house,” and different it was where he’d grown up. He talks about the immense amount of “smells in Brooklyn: Coffee, fingernail polish, eucalyptus…” and how other might hate it, but he enjoys it. In the same section, he describes how he enjoys the Brooklyn accent and the noise and smells that other people make on the streets and at the park across from his house. “Charcoal smoke drifts into the