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Joyce's First (Dub)liner |
| Section: MODERN THOUGHT / THE LOVE OF LANGUAGE: SCHOLARS WRITE ABOUT OPENING SENTENCES |
| Author: Morton A. Kaplan |
| Publication: The world & I online |
| Issue Date: 6/1/1995 |
| Size: 779 Words, 4,592 Characters |
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It takes more than a good first sentence to make a good writer, but one cannot be a good writer without knowing how to write a good first sentence. The first sentence must gain the attention of potential readers and focus their attention on the message or story the writer wishes to convey.
"Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came up from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and razor lay crossed." Joyce has set the scene with the first sentence of Ulysses. We are shown--shown because the language is eidetic--an apparently, although not actual, stereo...
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... to betray speech and writing. It was not always thus. I remember reading letters John Quincy Adams wrote at the age of eleven and discovering with chagrin that I could not begin to achieve his style of writing. Perhaps that aristocratic type of education cannot be recaptured in our egalitarian age, but surely we cannot accept our present mean condition. It all starts with the first sentence.
(580 of 4,592 characters)
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