In the following I’m going to analyse Arnold`s feelings and emotions in the chapter “Why chicken means so much to me” and explain his emotional conditions. In this connection I will look closer at his language and the stylistic devices used in the text.

It’s very obvious that especially in this chapter Arnold uses a lot a of repetitions to stress his statements and to make them memorably. For example on page 17, ll. 8-10: “[…], but I’m really just a poor-ass reservation kid living with his poor-ass family on the poor-ass Spokane indian Reservation.”. This shows that he is not happy about being poor because he connects “poor” with “ass”, which is a negative word.

This thought gets more clear in the following of the Chapter, where he tells us about the fate of his dog Oscar, who was very important to him. This is shown with the enumaration on page 19, ll. 12-14. But one day Ocar got sick . Arnold makes use of the repetition/ anaphora “Nothing.Nothing.Nothing” (p.20), which demonstrates how desperate and hopeless he was because he couldn’t do anything to save the life of his dog. The next anaphora expresses his anger towards his dad ( p21, ll. 8-10: “I wanted to […].I wanted to […].I wanted to […]”), because he decided to end the suffer of Oscar by shooting him. But he says that he knows that he can’t blame his parents. In this context he makes use of the methaphor “[…]my mother and my father are the twin suns around which I orbit and my world would EXPLODE without them.”and the concurrent exaggeration “EXPLODE” to stress the relevance of his parents for him. As he said they are as important for him as the sun, because just like nobody and nothing could live/survive without the sun, Arnold could not live without his parents. Another aspect needed to be focused on is the fact that the most used word in this chapter is “poor” ( almost in every page) -because it’t the main topic-,connected with a lot of negative and agressive words like “hate” (p.21), “blame” (p.21), “pain”(p.24) , “nothing”, “cry” etc., to  produce a bad emotion, so the reader is forced to associate a negative feeling with the word  “poor”. But there are still some postive words like “(to) dream” (p.21) and “believe”, “trust”  and “love”, to show that there is still hope left.