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20 October 2009
Garry Trudeau’s “My Inner Shrimp”:
View on the Appearances
While growing up, did imperfections make you feel inferior? Perhaps you were skinny, less intelligent, and darker-skinned than the other children. Being short affected Garry Trudeau’s adolescence and adulthood. Throughout “My Inner Shirmp,” Trudeau uses humor, pathos and metaphor to tell adolescents that concern about appearances in early life can continue impact one later in life.
Trudeau provides a light and humorous tone throughout the entire essay explaining how height is important to him. The use of a humorous tone makes the readers enjoy the amusement; for instance, at the beginning of his essay, Trudeau mentions a period of time when he was shorter than the other children; to him, it was like a “visit to the planet of the teenage midgets” (37). Trudeau feels being short is an embarrassment. It is funny that he says, “I was drafted into a contingent of students ignominiously dubbed the ‘Midget,’ so grouped by taller boys presumably so they could taunt us with more prefect efficiency” (52), because it seems he has been an innocent. Another example is that Trudeau was short before the seventeenth birthday, but at the age of seventeen his sudden, last-minute increase in height had occurred, and he was so happy about it and says because “the Commissioner of Growth Spurts had been an old classmate of my father” (50). It is interesting that he uses the statement of Commissioner of Growth Spurts because the Growth Spurt is not something people can command; so the Commissioner of Growth Spurts which he used in the sentence to describe the growth of his puberty, brings a sense of humor to the essay. Furthermore, in paragraph eleven of the essay, Trudeau describes the methods he took to try to become taller, he mentions that “Strategies for stretching the limbs were suggested—hanging from door frames, sleeping on your back, doing assorted floor exercises—all of which I incorporated into my daily routine (get up, brush teeth, hang from door frame)”(51). This is humorous because it serves as a profound recalling on how absurd it was to do these exercises day after day, believing that they would help him to grow taller.
Besides a humorous tone throughout his essay, there are some moments where Trudeau uses pathos to affect the readers’ emotion and to persuade the readers the emotional sorrow that his short stature brought to him when he was a teenager. He uses pathos to. For example, he says, “my parents given me a delayed development timetable” (52). This statement shows the author wants to be taller but his parents made him shorter, at birth. This delayed development caused him to lack engagement in school activities. An audience who has experienced similar issues can feel sympathetic. Trudeau gives another example and mentions how his “visit to the planet of the teenage midgets was harrowing, humiliating, and extended” (50), as though he belonged to another planet other than earth. Garry Trudeau was downhearted because he was treated as a midget by other people. He cried because he was short; he says “the night I found myself sobbing in my father’s arms was the low point; we both knew it was one problem he couldn’t fix”(51). Trudeau was sad and even cried. He was very concerned about his height when he was young, “for six years, my condition persisted; I grew, but at nowhere near the rate of my peers” (51). The reader feels sympathetic towards the author’s actions. For a long period of six years, his addiction in attempting to be taller, by repeating hanging from door frame and sleeping on his back, reflect how the matter of being tall led him to constantly make efforts to “strive, seek, find, and not yield”(Tennyson). While reading an audience can almost feel his suffering and his sorrow. This is pathos because it shows the readers how important the height was to the writer. Trudeau’s experiences being short affect his whole life: “the impact of being literally looked down on, of being made to feel small, is forever” (51). Being short made him lack of athletic accomplishment, as he says, “Lack of athletic success, all absence of a social life, the inevitable run-ins with bullies-all could be attributed to the missing inches”(51). Since he wasn’t tall enough to make all the athletic accomplishment, he feels sad. Being tall meant a lot to him, he explains, “shot up six inches, all of life’s disappointments, reversals, and calamities still arrived on schedule- but blissfully free of subtext” (51).
Trudeau uses metaphors to tell people that he cares about his height. The metaphor can make something wordy and complex, into something compact and simple. For example, the title, “My Inner Shrimp,” literally means he has the soul of a shrimp, which is to say that the memory of being short during his adolescence helped him understanding “how to stretch, how to survive the scorn of others for things that beyond his control” (52). He would be stronger just like a shrimp stretches when it moves. A complex idea is included in the simple three words, “My Inner Shrimp”. Trudeau uses Another metaphor by comparing himself to the “haunted veterans” and his past to a “battlefield”, he expresses the inner confusion he once experienced for the reader to realize the difficult conflicts that he was forced to confront; he says, “like some haunted veteran come again to an ancient battlefield”(51), and he “was revisiting his perilous past”（51）. Another metaphor is, “I’m starting to shrink” (52). Trudeau shows that when he returns to a high school reunion, once again, he will be remained short in his high school classmates’ eyes.
Can you recognize similar experiences that you have had after Trudeau shares his? Trudeau uses a variety of strategies to grab the reader and connect by exploring adolescent issues that relate to all. He effectively expresses to adolescents that appearance is important to him by using humor, pathos and logos.
Works Cited
Trudeau, Garry. My Inner Shrimp. Life Studies, Ed. David Cavitch. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001. 50-52.
