Naava Smolash, PhD – English Department, Douglas College
Scarlet Majors: Explication in literary analysis
The word "explication" derives from a Latin word meaning "to unfold" or "to spread out." By stating specifically what is only suggested, the explication explains how a literary passage works, revealing meanings that are not readily apparent on a casual reading. “Explication” is often used to describe a process whereby you explain an entire poem. However, in a literary essay that relies on Close Reading, you are expected to use careful and full explication of quotations in the body paragraphs of your essay. In this kind of explication, you lift words and short phrases out of your quotations and explain in precise detail how the language of the text creates meaning. You can make connections that aren’t immediately apparent to the reader; you can unpack the meanings of words and support your argument about how the specific language of the text resonates. While these logical connections may seem self-evident to you as you are writing, your reader is not in your head and may not make the same connections or associations. A solid explication, in a body paragraph, will spell out the connections, to make your argument “airtight.”
In this (simplified) example below, the explication is in bold.
Base Details
If I were fierce, and bald, and short of breath,
I’d live with scarlet Majors at the base,
And speed glum heroes up the line to death.
You’d see me with my puffy, petulant face,
Guzzling and gulping in the best hotel,
Reading the Roll of Honor. “Poor young chap,”
I’d say—“I used to know his father well;
Yes, we’ve lost heavily in this last scrap.”
And when the war is done and youth stone dead,
I’d toddle safely home and die—in bed.
—Sigfried Sassoon
Bitterness in "Base Details"
Old men make and run wars; young men fight and die in them. In “Base Details,” Sigfried
Sassoon reveals through his diction a bitterness toward the fact that young men die in wars while
the officers live safely behind the lines, back at the base. The speaker in the poem is an ordinary soldier on the front line. Through his choice of words, the soldier expresses an attitude of contempt for what he calls the "scarlet Majors" (2), the officers who “speed glum heroes up to the line of death” (3). The reference to 'scarlet' recalls the red dress uniforms of British officers as well as the color of blood. ‘Scarlet’ can also mean “morally offensive” (Oxford 369). Taken together, these meanings evoke the speaker’s contempt for generals in red uniform who send young men to shed blood in their stead. This soldier speaks with sarcasm of the officers’s fierceness and goes on to describe them as “bald, and short of breath” (1). If he were a major, he imagines, he too would have a “puffy, petulant face / guzzling and gulping in the best hotel” (4-5). The words 'puffy,' and 'short of breath' paint an image of men who are out of shape from drinking and eating too much. The double meaning of the title "base details" suggests that the majors who stay back at the military 'base' are also 'base': lowly, dishonourable, disgraceful. Clearly, the speaker in this poem holds little respect for these officers who prefer to send young men to die rather than take risks themselves.
(Adapted from: Gordon, Edward. Writing About Imaginative Literature. New York: Harcourt, 1973. 94, 96.)
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