A Freshman’s Experience by Jean Webster

            The analysis of “A freshman’s experience”

The story is entitled “A freshman’s experience” and it was written by an American writer Jean Webster who was an American writer and author of many books including Daddy-Long-Legs and Dear Enemy. Her best-known books feature lively and likeable young female protagonists who come of age intellectually, morally, and socially, but with enough humor, snappy dialogue, and gently biting social commentary to make her books palatable and enjoyable to contemporary readers. So, the story “A freshman’s experience” is a part of a novel “Daddy-long-legs”, which is written in the form of letters. The author these letters, a young girl, Judy by name, writes them to her guardian, a rich man whom she has never seen. This text is one of her letters giving us a glimpse of her early college impressions.

The plot of the story is built around the character of Judy, who studies at college and she is very impressed. It touches upon an interesting episode of her life, that’s why she tells her Daddy everything and even more. The action the whole story takes place in America, because the word “college”, which is the place of “higher education” helps us to guess that. The story can be divided into three logically connected parts.

The opening part tells us about a girl who writes a letter to her Daddy. She tells him everything in details. The author focuses his attention on her impressions and uses such epithets like “embarrassing, awful”. The girl tries to talk to her Daddy through her letter that’s why she asks him a rhetorical question “He sounds like an archangel, doesn’t he?” The author uses exclamations in Judy’s speech to show that she is very emotional girl “I’m just as bright in class as any of the others, and brighter than some of them!” The author through Judy’s actions and behavior shows the readers her character, so he uses indirect method of characterization. But at the same time he uses first person narration, so Judy tells us everything. Judy is very shy and sometimes she is very ashamed of her knowledge, but she tries to improve it in any case. She succeed in her studying, but she doesn’t stop, so the is very purposeful, the author shows it in the sentence “Now I know all of these things and a lot of others besides, but you can see how much I need to catch up”

The secondary part of this story devoted to one more letter from Judy to Daddy. The author uses capital letter to name “Daddy” not casually, he wants to tell the readers that the girl respected her Daddy so much, that she wanted to elevate him. She thanks him for “five gold pieces” and tries to report all the purposes she had to spend them. She made even a list of her squanders and explained him why she acted like that, so she wanted to show him, that she had quite good reasons for spending and no wasting money “A dictionary of synonyms(to enlarge my vocabulary)” Then she excuses her purchase of a pair of silk stockings, she wants not to look a white crow in her college.

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