This is why I am a Chicago comma type of guy

"Ever since that fatal night, the end of my labours, and the beginning of my misfortunes, I had conceived a violent antipathy even to the name of natural philosophy" (pg 43).

 
Quick note: 100 posts, success.
Quick note #2:  My title rhymed.

As you can see in my above post, Victor describes his creation as "fatal," but in the sense that it killed his happiness, career and sanity.  It's ironic because in about seven pages, Victor believes a new form of fatal within the creation.

This year I have gotten so much better at noticing strange diction that authors use to set a tone.  When I read through it, I thought that it foreshadowed that the creation would kill someone, but now that I reread it, I realize Victor was using it in reference to his labours.  This brought up another question for me to answer though - why would Mary Shelley be so redundant with her writing.  See, this quote could either be a list of three or two depending on how you read the list.  Is "the end of my labours" a clarification of the night, or is Victor describing three ways to interpret the same night, because it would be clear given later hypotheses of Victor that the night could be interpreted as "fatal."  This is why I hate grammar.  The ambiguity of this parallelism is driving me insane.

Okay, I wouldn't say that I hate grammar because it does save lives.

Oh, and let's not forget Andy Grammer.

"The Apparition"

"Bathed in a cold quicksilver sweat, wilt lie

A verier ghost than I" (12-3).

In "The Apparition" by John Donne, I kept thinking about how this completely negates everything I learned from Casper: The Friendly Ghost.  I felt like the tone was definitely revengeful.  Donne creates this tone by his very scary imagery of wanting to get back at an old "murderess" lover.  The diction in this poem confuses me.  Literally, it sounds like the speaker is truly a ghost, but I think that it was more metaphoric for killing the speakers sanity.  This really only makes sense logistically and does not have much text support (other than maybe line 8 and 13).  If the speaker wants revenge, then simply being a ghost would leave them incapable of any physical ability for revenge.  I think that the idea of a ghost is a metaphor for the speaker being invisible to the former lover.  In line 13, the speaker wants to make his old lover a "verier ghost."  I took this to mean that the speaker is not a ghost, but that he wants to make the cause of his broken heart a true ghost (e.g. dead).

Never Let Me Go - Eighteen

"Then something changed in [Madame's] expression.  It didn't become warmer exactly.  But that revulsion got put away somewhere, and she studied us carefully, squinting in the setting sun" (pg 248).

This alliteration really drew me to the detailed diction that had been going on throughout the book.  I had not realized (or "realised") until now that whenever something was really important, Kathy would go into extra detail to describe everything from the weather to the time of day to people's reactions.  Alliterations usually are used to make you stop and realize the importance of something while making it easier to read.

I noticed how this detailed diction really carried on throughout chapter twenty-one when Kathy was describing Madame and her house.  She kept describing the chairs and darkness of the house which created a sort of suspense.  I kept knowing that something was going to happen because of how the rooms were dark and Madame was standing opposite Kathy and Tommy to where she could peer into the darkness.  All of these details in the room structure made me realize the magnitude of the situation with Madame.

So in the end of these two chapters, Miss Emily appears from the shadows on a wheelchair.  I have to think about how this may have to relate to why Hailsham finally went away.  Since Miss Emily was the "principal" of sorts, her leaving may have meant that the entire "school" was forced to go away.  I also have to wonder where the rest of the guardians went or if they will be making a guest appearance.

To relate this to Brave New World I have to talk about the want of living in solitude.  Kathy and Tommy grew up in Hailsham, which was like the Hatchery in that they strive to be the perfect society where there was peace and community, but when Kathy and Tommy left, they just wanted to live in peace and solitude.