3rd Analysis

Analyzing Articles with Murray’s Help

For people today, Hurricane Katrina is still fresh in their minds. It left little behind when it ripped through the states that line the Gulf of Mexico. The Times-Picayune won the Pulitzer Prize for its articles on this devastation.
In "Looters Leave Nothing Behind in Storm's Wake," writers, Mike Perlstein and Brian Thevenot, tell of all the looting that took place in the stores. They set the scene by describing people taking advantage of the situation by saying, "Inside the store, the scene alternated between celebration and frightening bedlam. A shirtless man straddled a broken jewelry case, yelling, "Free samples, free samples over here."" They could have just said that there was a man on a jewelry case yelling, but their adjectives and the quotations really add to the story and help us imagine it more clearly.
They end their story with the external dialogue, ""It must be legal," she said. "The police are here taking stuff, too."" This, I'm sure, is what everyone there was thinking. Perhaps, while you read the story, you thought the same way, so it was an excellent way to end it.
Like Murray says, third-person works best in narrative. Perlstein and Thevenot used third-person well when they said, "Officers claimed there was nothing they could do to contain the anarchy, saying their radio communications had broken down and they had no direction from commanders." In a sense, they had to use third-person because they were telling other people's stories.
The above quotation could also be seen as exposition in the story. They explain what the officers were going through at the time of the looting. This helps us understand why they did nothing to stop it.
Another article that helped The Times-Picayune win the Pulitzer Prize was "Swollen Feet Impede Diabetic's Evacuation" by Keith Spera. This story dealt with people’s struggle to find help after Hurricane Katrina.
When we are first introduced to 65 year-old Faye Taplin, we are given external dialogue when she tells Spera, "I'm tired," she said. "My feet have swollen up on me. I can't walk that far."We are given exposition when Spera says that “she clutched two plastic bags containing bedding, a little food and water and insulin to treat her diabetes.”
Your heart goes out to a stroke victim that was in a wheel chair when their sister, Clara Wallace says, "Nobody has a bathroom he can use." Again, Spera is using external dialogue to make you feel the story more. When you get words straight from the source it makes the story more real and helps you connect with the characters.
Speaking of character, this story has many. The story starts with the 93-year-old woman in the beginning whose husband died and was taken by a truck to Convention Center Boulevard and left there. Of course there is Faye Taplin and Clara Wallace and her brother.
At the end of the story, Spera goes back to the old woman who was left with her deceased husband. By telling us about them in the beginning of the story and then going back to them at the end and saying, “Eventually, guardsmen loaded her into a truck and hauled her off with other elderly evacuees,” Spera demonstrates the element of chronological order.
With dramatic action like, “Seated next to her husband's body on the neutral ground beneath the St. Joseph Street sign, Allie Harris munched on crackers, seemingly unaware of the tragedy unfolding around her,” we feel for this old woman who just lost her husband.
This story also had internal dialogue when he says, “As the afternoon wore on, hope faded, replaced by anger.” We are able to tell what the characters were feeling which really adds to the effect of the story.
He ends the story in an excellent way. "This is 2005," John Murray shouted, standing in the street near Mr. Harris' body. "It should not be like this for no catastrophe. This is pathetic." If this isn’t an example of great external dialogue, then I don’t know what is.
Both of these stories used Murray’s elements of narratives very effectively. By using internal dialogue, external dialogue, scene, character, exposition, and others, a writer can really make a reader connect to their story.