Seeing People Off

Vorobyova Olesya, RP-123
Text analysis.
SEEING PEOPLE OFF by Max Beerbohm
Henry Maximilian Beerbohm (London 24 August 1872 – 20 May 1956 Rapallo) was an English essayist, parodist, and caricaturist. He was a popular radio broadcaster, talking about cars, carriages, and music halls for the BBC.   His wit is shown often enough in his caricatures but his letters contain a carefully blended humour—a gentle admonishing of the excesses of the day. Beerbohm's best known works include A Christmas Garland (1912), a parody of literary styles, Seven Men (1919) and Zuleika Dobson (1911), a satire of undergraduate life at Oxford. This was his only novel, but it was very successful.
The text Seeing People Off tells us about two men: the narrator, who is seeing his friend off. He is confused and embarrassed; he does not know what to tell in this situation, how to express his feelings; and Hubert Le Ros, who is seeing a young American lady off. This man perfectly knows how to behave in this situation. He is speaking, he is crying, he is expressing his feelings freely. The narrator is looking at him with envy. Suddenly, he recognized his old acquaintance in this man. Hubert Le Ros recognized the narrator too. During their conversation, Le Ros tells the narrator about the Anglo-American Social Bureau and about his role in it. Eventually, they agreed that Le Ros would give the narrator a course to teach him to be good seer-off, to express his feelings freely.
This text we can divide into some parts.
The first part is introduction, which tells us about two scenes of farewell. In the same part, we learn some details about Hubert Le Ros. In this part, we can see some stylistic devices. One of them is an inversion in the sentence «and framed in the window of the railway-carriage, was the face of our friend». Author used the inversion to achieve an emotional effect of grief. The second stylistic device is a repetition which is used for the purposes of emphasis. We can find it in the...