Doctor in the House

Analysis of Doctor in the House written by R. Gordon.

Before analyzing this story, it is important to mention that Richard Gordon used to be a practicing doctor before he started his career as a writer. His stories are based on personal experience, what makes them more striking.
The story is highly emotional and ironical and written in first person narration which tells about medical students’ experience of passing their final examination. The text is clearly divided into three parts according to the stages of examinations. The first part tells about students’ attitude to exams. The second deals with the written part of the exam, the third one is about oral part and tells how students get the results of the whole examination.
The author makes his narration bright and involving appealing to personal experience of readers: each and every of us used to be a student and had to pass exams. The readers got back in thoughts to their own experience and compare it with the main characters. Although, it turned out that in case of medical students it is a bit different, the author had already achieved his goal: he involved readers into narration appealing to their emotions.
The main subject of the story, as it was already told is final exams. It is interesting to observe how many stylistic devices are used by Gordon to describe the concept of examination.   In order to show all the depth of students’ feelings and emotions during the process of finals Richard Gordon from the very beginning of the text uses different stylistic devices such as for example simile: “final examinations are something like death” which at the same time is also an exaggeration with the help of which the author underlines attitude of graduates to this inescapable event. Another stylistic device is trite metaphor “But the medical student cannot see it in this light“which was used in order to show differences between two views points: students’ point and examiner’s one. Besides there are many...