After making the analysis of this text I understood that the love is a high feeling which arises between people only on condition of sincerity of mutual feelings of these people to each other.

The love is a pledge of happy existence of the person in the world. Therefore all of us have to understand the value of this feeling and appreciate every second of life which is connected with it. But the indifference can destroy the purity of feelings.

Expressive means and Stylistic devices

The author uses a lot of stylistic devices for example: epithets, metaphors, similes, personification  , oxymoron and zeugma.   

Epithets : scarifying retrospect, odorous masses, well-bred voices,drawling words ,  hopeless point, poor  consolation, innermost, unmitigated, arid unbedecked self, swift, limpid, upward look   

Metaphors :  garbs of pretence and egoism, the ruins of his self-conceit..

Similes : white favors like stars; as a desert drinks the rain; fluttered like a snared bird.  

Oxymoron: sullen exultation.

Personification : desert drinks the rain .

Zeugma:  garlicky, cockroachy banana steamer.

As for syntactical stylistic devices, O.Henry uses ellipsis, aposiopesis , parallelism and repetitions.

 Ellipsis : "A present," said Trysdale, "from a friend. Know the species?"    

Aposiopesis: But why...; If...

Parallelism:    He could have sworn, and he could swear now.        

 Repetitions :  “So childlike and so worshipful, and (he would once have sworn) so sincere”;”How glad, how shy, how tremulous she was! How she fluttered”          

The Character of the Story

There are three main characters in the story : Trysdale, his beloved and his friend. We meet the main character- Trysdale-at the beginning of the story. He seems to be very serious, calm. He is a young man, noble, educated and wealthy. He can be characterised as egoistic person  It is possible to guess author’s attituse to this chatacter from Trysdale’s speech and behavior. "He saw all the garbs of pretence and egoism that he had worn now turn to rags of folly”. He was selfish and egoist.Another character is Trysdale's friend, the brother of the bride. The He is a good brother he loves his sister and don’t want to let her gone ."Only little sister I had, too, and now she's gone". A lot of stylistic devices mentioned above are used to describe the main character.   

The plot of the story begins with the introduction where  the author prepare us unexpected moments. In the exposition the main characters and the scene are introduced. We get to know about the time  where everything has happened and characters. I think  the climax is when Trysdale makes a proposal to his love. As for the conclusion I think the author allows the readers to create their own continuation.

To sum up, I’d like to say that the plot of the story constructed. The unexpected end consists that the reader himselfshould finish the story. The tension remains till the end. If we love we should be to be open and sincere in relation to our belovers.

The Cactus

The Cactus

The Cactus is one of the greatest critiques of egotism and hypocritical conceit by O’Henry. The basic storyline is simple. Trysdale, a young man, noble, wealthy and cultured, realizes that his girl friend is excessively devoted to him and sort of worships him. She showers him with all sorts of superlative appellations and Trysdale very fondly accepts them, as naturally as the desert sand soaks up rain. He takes her for granted, since the guiding principle of his life is vanity. ‘She had always insisted on placing him upon a pedestal, and he had accepted her homage with royal dignity’. Ultimately the day comes when Trysdale proposes to her. He is sure that she would be too eager to accept him readily. She showed all kinds of emotional jubilation and her body language too had been one of eager consent.’ How glad, how shy, how tremulous she was.

The story is set in Trysdale’s drawing room after the marriage ceremony of this girl was over and the scent of the huge bunches of flowers piled in the church was still haunting him. He was filled with bitterness and chagrin, trying to ruminate upon the reason for his loss and how lovingly the girl had given her to the bridegroom in a public ceremony within the church. Trysdale was deeply distressed and looked unhappy. With him, at the present moment, was his friend who happens to be the brother of the bride, who coincidentally finds the tag on the cactus and says that it was a common cactus in South America where he lived, and that the word on the tag was not a biological name, but a common Spanish word with which the plant is called. Trysdale now realizes his fault at ignoring the tag and the cactus sent by his proposed girl friend and instead expecting her assent in the way he expected her to give it .Trysdale knew very well that that was not true, that all his Spanish was mugged up from hackneyed Spanish phrases which he often learnt from the dictionaries and used them only to show off. But Trysdale was too proud to tell her the truth. She, therefore, was under the impression that he was a master of Spanish and had, therefore, very romantically assented to his proposal in the Spanish language which he had failed to comprehend, thus giving her a false impression of being rejected by him.

O’Henry suggests through "The Cactus" that love demands truth and openness of heart. “The Cactus” is devoted to the relationships between men and women. In particular, the author criticizes egoism and conceit.

The main idea of the story is the element of the destiny. This history teaches us not to be false-fased person, do  not  exposed to the influence of others, and the most important to be yourself in different situations, especially in relations with family, friends and your lovers.

 The events in the analysed story happen in Trysdale’s bachelor apartments after the marriage ceremony of a girl he was going to marry but he’d lost her. While standing there and putting his gloves off he tries to understand why it’s happened. Trysdale is filled with bitterness and perplexity. The atmosphere in the room is dull like Trysdale's thoughts. He thinks about the last few hours. Why is he so gloomy? There was the wedding of woman he loved and he even proposed to her.

 From the viewpoint of presentation the story is the 3rd person narration.

O.HENRY

                                                O.HENRY

The story under analysis “The Cactus” is written by well-known American writer O. Henry. His short stories are known in a whole world.Prolific American short-story writer, a master of surprise endings, whose narratives were typically set in Texas or New York City. O. Henry combined humor and pathos with an ironic twist of plot. Although some critics were not so enthusiastic about his formulatic way of writing, the public loved his entertaining tales and uncomplicated characters.

He wrote nearly 600 stories about life in America. Among his most famous stories are:"The Gift of the Magi" ,"The Ransom of Red Chief", "The Cop and the Anthem" ,"A Retrieved Reformation", "The Duplicity of Hargraves". The last collection of short stories was “Waifs and Strays” published in 1917. “The Cactus” belongs to this book and is one of the best stories among other. This story was written earlier and the exact time is unknown. But the fact is that the last collection consists of stories, including “The Cactus” that were written earlier but were not published.

O. Henry died of cirrhosis of the liver on June 5, 1910, in New York. At the time of his death, he was deeply in dept. O. Henry's funeral ceremony at the Little Church Around the Corner was brief. Three more collections, Sixes and Sevens (1911), Rolling Stones (1912) and Waifs and Strays (1917), came out posthumously. In 1918 the O. Henry Memorial Awards were established to be given annually to the best magazine stories, the winners and leading contenders to be published in an annual volume.

The Beginning!

So, I'm glad to represent my own blog. I've chosen the short story by O.Henry "The Cactus", as I've heard about it earlier. I hope that it will be as interesting, as my friend described the impressions from it.
I'm sure that this kind of studying English stylistics will help me to get to a higher level of understanding of literature. I hope to learn a lot while doing stylistic analysis, because it's really a new kind of activity for me and I think it'll be interesting.