Linguistic Specific textual examples of what youve observed when reading at this levelcited in MLA format.

(You may use numbers or bullets here to take notes) It joined the Boy Scouts and painted its toenails red; it played Begin the Beguine out the back window; it went off to war and stayed at home, watching newsreels (211) As sperm meets egg, I feel a jolt. Theres a loud sound, a sonic boom as my world cracks (211) The lease on my terrific little apartment is finally up and Im being evicted (211)

Semantic Against a black background they swim, a long white silken thread spinning itself out (211) As sperm meets egg, I feel a jolt. Theres a loud sound, a sonic boom as my world cracks (211) With the shred of all-knowingness I have left, I see my grandfather, Lefty Stephanides, on the night of my birth nine months from now, turning a demitasse cup upside down on a saucer. I see his coffee grounds forming a sign as pain explodes in his temple and he topples to the floor (211) Calliope depicts herself as an omniscient. She describes the migration of the chromosome that caused her hermaphroditic biology through her family history. However, as a narrator she shows signs of unreliability, as well as signs of denying her life. Her sarcastic quips cause Calliope to seem anxious of her life, as though she was protecting herself from her birth through the mutation. However, this is inevitable, within Calliopes eyes. Her intersexual birth was the product of the gods, of another force that brought a series of events to cause her birth.

Structural The bedroom grows still. Inside my mother, a billion sperm swim upstream, males in the lead (210) Against a black background they swim, a long white silken thread spinning itself out (211) That baby passed the mutation on to her son, who passed it on to his two daughters, who passed it on to three of their children (my great-greatgreats, etc.) (211)

Cultural The thread began on a day two hundred and fifty years ago, when the biology gods, for their own amusement, monkeyed with a gene on a babys fifth chromosome (210) Crossing the ocean, it faked a romance, circled a ships deck, and made love in a lifeboat (211) But there was still time, everything was in place, the roller coaster was in free fall and there was no stopping it now, my father was seeing visions of little girls and my mother was praying to a Christ Pantocrator (211)

Demonstrate the development of complexity of thought at each level by writing a descriptive response to what youve written in the row above. (Analyze your thought patterns when observing the examples youve listed abovethese may also be in note-taking form)

Eugenides uses parallelism in order to narrate the progression of the mutation along the four familial generations. However, this migratory narration is intertwined with first person narrative and the metaphor of being evicted from an apartment, when actually being born from the contact of egg and sperm. Eugenides writing also interlaces numerous allusions to Greek mythology, such as gods, as well as thematic messages of hybridity as seen through the immigration from Greek to American origins within the family.

Eugenides sentence structure varies throughout his writing. Initially beginning with the first person narrative, he describes the migration of sperm to the egg. However, the writing grows more distant and depicts specific incidents that ultimately, inevitably, caused Calliopes birth. Long, paralleled sentences create the summary of the chronology in which Eugenides then writes in a personal, first person narrative. This shows the omniscience of Calliope within the novel.

Calliopes experiences permeate further than her own. She is an omniscient narrator, similar to Tiresias. However, as she describes previous events in previous lives, she distances herself. As the events unfold unto her own life, her voice becomes more personal, until the story is told in present tense, in which Calliopes experiences become her own. However, the experiences that her previous family felt caused her to understand her hybrid nature and form acceptances with how she was born, and how society raised her with preconceived notions of gender and livelihood.