Read this passage out loud, noting the diction (word choice) and syntax (word arrangements), including the rhythm and length of its sentences. What effect does the passage have on you as you move through it? Is the speaker involved or uninvolved, moved or indifferent? How are horror and grief being handled? Keeping in mind sentence length and structure, diction, tone of voice and attitude of the narrator, write a paragraph assessing the speaker's frame of mind as evidenced through rhetoric.
Look at his bed covering. His leg lies under a wire basket. The bed covering arches over it. I kick Muller on the shin for he is just about to tell Kemmerich what the orderlies told us outside: that Kemmerich has lost his foot. The leg is amputated. He looks ghastly, yellow and wan. In his face there are already the strained lines that we know so well, we have seen them now hundreds of times. They are not so much line as marks. Under the skin the life no longer pulses, it has already pressed out the boundaries of the body. Death is working through from within. It already has command of the eyes. Here lies our comrade, Kemmerich, who a little while ago was roasting horse flesh with us and squatting in the shell holes. He it is still, and yet it is not he any longer. His features have become uncertain and faint, like a photographic plate from which two pictures have been taken.* Even his voice sounds like ashes.
* the features look uncertain like a double-exposed photograph.
The Coffee House Orator by Edgar Bundy
