Close Reading No. 3

For this post, I chose the Slate article, "Comfort food," by Larry Lake.  It can be found at http://www.slate.com/articles/life/family/2013/11/families_dealing_with_mental_illness_need_support_too.html

In this article, Lake describes how society tends to embrace certain diseases and problems, like cancer or accidents, but points a cold shoulder towards many serious issues like drug abuse and mental illness.  In describing his experiences between his wife and daughter, he uses imagery, syntax, and details to get his ideas across.

Lake uses imagery to emphasize different ideas throughout his essay.  In the beginning of the essay, he uses sensory imagery to describe the food that his family received from the community during his wife's breast cancer treatments.  For example, he describes "chicken breasts encrusted with parmesan," "bubbling pans of lasagna," and "warm home-baked rolls."  He appeals to almost all of the reader's senses and almost instills a feeling of actual hunger in them by vividly portraying the food that he received.  Through this description, Lake is able to emphasize the idea that his entire community was in support of his family during their ordeal with his wife's cancer.  This serves as a deep contrast to the later descriptions of food in the article under the narrative of his daughter's struggles with alcohol abuse.  In pointing out the lack of community support, he describes one meal as "soup and grilled cheese," which almost sounds bland and depressing, which follows in this contrast.  The most detailed imagery in this section comes during the description of his daughter's car accident; he writes "a swollen mass of stitches, bruises and torn flesh" in describing her face in the hospital.  Lake never went into such graphic detail when describing his wife's outlook during radiation treatment, and these conflicting techniques serve to show the support they received in one case and the lack of in another.  The reader is also left in a much more empathetic position towards Maggie (his daughter).  Through a tactical use of imagery, Lake is able to establish his idea that those who suffer from mental ailments and addictions, like his daughter, are almost cast away by society with little to no support.

The syntax in the article serves to maintain the flow of ideas as Lake builds his argument.  In particular, he makes use of verbals to build up suspense in the narrative on Maggie.  For example, right before the accident, he writes "dozing off" and "maybe she was thinking."  As he describes the scene in the car, the reader is left to wonder about what is coming next until Lake ends this situation abruptly and forcefully with a short, straightforward sentence ("That night, an oncoming speeding car hit the van head on.").  He also makes repeated use of fragments to emphasize the lack of food (and thus support), such as in the sentence, "No warm casseroles."  Though short and choppy, this technique is especially effective as Lake tries to reemphasize the lack of compassion from his community while his daughter was dealing with an issue that could be considered more serious than his wife's cancer.  Likewise, he uses this technique of short or fragmented sentences in the earlier narrative of his wife's issues to emphasize and repeat certain details.  Aside from these, Lake mostly employs long, complex sentence structure, which connects his details into these strings of thought.  An example of this is: "Leftovers piled up in the refrigerator, and soon the freezer filled up too, this tsunami of food offerings an edible symbol of our community’s abundant generosity." By combining the trends of his filling fridge with the support of his friends into one long sentence, he creates a correlation between the two.  Lake's use of syntax serves to maintain a flow throughout the essay, which is interrupted at certain points to call to the reader's attention.

The details that Lake chose to include greatly influence the overall effect of the piece upon the reader.  Most often, the contrasting information between his wife's and daughter's stories serve to illustrate his overall point that people tend to ignore mental disease.  For example, he barely skims over the process in describing his wife's treatment, but in his daughter's treatment, he goes into each specific stage and event that occurred throughout.  In a way, it makes the reader more aware of the issue that Lake is trying to expose.  The fact that his wife had breast cancer is much more understandable to a reader as opposed to alcohol addiction but Lake reverses that scenario in the description.  Furthermore, certain details that are brought up in his wife's story resurface throughout, such as the idea of people offering or not offering help.  That detail in particular serves to point a finger at society or communities for failing to recognize the gravity of mental illnesses.  The conflicting details that Lake places in the article emphasize the societal issue that he is trying to point out to the reader.

In this article, Lake tries to get his readers to understand the bleak situation caused by society ignoring the needs of mentally ill or addicted people, as opposed to more universal problems/diseases like cancer or car crashes.  Through an effective use of imagery, syntax, and details, he succeeds in getting this point across.