the essay "skaz"

Summary of essay “Skaz”

Skaz is the description of a type of first-person narration that uses the colloquial speech. It has a special effect: the use of the spoken teenage language makes you feel as if you’re in the story. The narrator refers to him – or herself as “I”, and addresses the reader as “you”. The Skaz forms an illusion that is quite powerful to catch the reader. The Skaz gave American authors the possibility to write the way they wanted to and not to write by using the literary traditions of England and Europe. The first author who used the Skaz was Mark Twain’s with his novel Huckleberry Fin. You can compare Mark Twain’s protagonist in Huckleberry Fin with J.D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield. The features of Holden’s narrative style that make it sound like the teenager speech are the many repetitions, the slang expressions, the hyperboles, the short and uncomplicated sentences, the short expression and the grammatical mistakes. Even the long sentences are written in a way you would think he just said it spontaneously. The book describes a lot of or almost only situations of everyday life. So the author uses the language to make it interesting. Everything the author writes has to be written in a seventeen-year-old New Yorker slang (and can’t use poetic metaphors) to make it authentic. This “low” language with its grammatical incorrectness in the social and cultural environment he comes from creates the derisive humor of the book. To understand the book and that was Holden/ the author says you have to read between the lines. This is really effective to catch the reader. Another thing that makes it a pleasure to read is the rhythm of colloquial speech.