Understanding Peggy Paula: An Analysis of Hunter's Style

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I was surprised how quickly I caught onto Hunter’s style and how much I enjoyed it. Especially with this story. If someone were to tell me Three Things You Should Know about Peggy Paula consisted of eight sentences in six pages, I would have been curious but perhaps intimidated to read the story or maybe even discouraged. But readers can easily follow along and what struck me most was how connected we felt to Peggy Paula-- a person so clearly on the outside-- and one Hunter wants us to always see on the outside. We see her abnormalities in every section, but we are also sympathetic for her and much of this is because of the way the story is told. Again, if these segments were broken up into more sentences, we would feel a separation. The story …show more content…

I wonder, too, how Hunter came to decide that her story would be styled this way. Did she start writing it like this, or did she go back and combine the thoughts, ideas, actions, and adjectives together because she envisioned a certain effect? I also imagine the editing process being difficult with this story because the writer may have been thinking about her readers--what they need in terms of structure or understanding-- but without altering her visions for the work. In the following stories, the run-on sentences are still prevalent but they are not as abundant as the first. This slows the stories down; however, the run-ons provide us with the same bursts of description, action and thought. We feel connected, as if we are watching everything happen over the characters’ shoulders. One of my favorite stories in the collection, Dishes, has this balance. The balance, though, makes the run-ons jump out because readers are not as used to them. On page 26 the story opens with the first paragraph in four sentences. These sentences set-up the scene for us in a common structure. In other words, the sentences are all grammatically correct. They have a clear beginning, middle and end and have nouns, prepositions and verbs in all the common places. I

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