Relating to Kevin: A Close Analysis of Shriver’s Language on Page 455. Eira Khan College

Shriver uses the page (455) itself as an opportunity for Eva’s character to justify the actions and the, apparent, true intentions and thoughts of her son, Kevin. As we do not hear this from Kevin himself, due to the affectionless psychopathy he suffers from as a result of the maternal deprivation he was submitted to as a child (causing an inability for him to verbalize his emotions), his mother’s role as a depicter is vital in gaining the empathetic response that Shriver wants from her readers in relation to Kevin’s character. This may perhaps be one of the reasons for Shriver’s selection of an epistolary style; to allow character inferences to be made through the report of our main and most trusted character as their depictions, their indicative language, is our most reliable source of information and this is crucial in creating an effectively empathetic mother-son relationship for the desired end of the novel.

The lexical choices Shriver makes throughout the novel and particularly on this page are reflective of our narrator’s hesitance about the reality of the situations that surround life around her son. The very first line (of this page), “Clearly the sunlight had played some visual trick”, displays a modality change...