Analysis 2

Story

This guitar is played by a young girl in her teens. She spends the summers with her family in their Spanish-style home and enjoys playing the guitar on nice sunny days. She actually prefers to play more than going out sightseeing because she expresses her homesickness through music. At the moment, she has gone to the kitchen to enjoy a small lunch, but will return shortly and pick up the guitar where she left off. Her guitar was a gift to her from her grandfather who also played guitar in his lifetime and serves as an additional reason as to why she loves the guitar so much.

Structuralism

From the structuralist point of view, “literature might be seen as a displaced version of religion.” For the girl in the story, playing music is her “literature” because it keeps her sane and in order while she is missing her friends while she’s away on vacation. Rather than arguing with her parents every day about how much she wishes to return home, she looks to her music and explores and expresses herself this way.


Formalism

The guitar in the painting is defamiliarized because it is the center of the piece, whereas usually this object would merely be passed by most people. According to Viktor Shklovsky, “after we see an object several times, we begin to recognize it – hence we cannot say anything significant about it,” and, therefore, the object loses its importance to most people (1). Since the focus is on the guitar itself, people evoke meanings and emotions about the guitar since it is alone, displayed without its owner. Many people would not take the time to think about the implications which could come with a guitar “as we apprehend objects only as shapes with imprecise extensions,” says Shklovsky (1). When we view an object which is part of our daily routine within a context, such as in a house or setting, it loses its awe and becomes bland. For example, Shklovsky personifies a horse and in doing so accomplishes to raise emotions and awareness in the fact that the horse has lost his significance simply because he is viewed as an everyday part of life. The same idea can be applied to the guitar painting in that like the horse, we, too, can imagine the view of the guitar and stop to think about the guitar as more than just an object and as an instrument which produces beautiful music.


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