Blog #4 Memoir Style Model Analysis : Scars by David Owen

The surface culture components for the memoir Scars would be celebration and then the deep culture component would be concept of self because the author was in a way celebrating the scars that he and others he knew had, he was saying they aren't something that you should want to hide. The deep culture component would be concept of self because he kept emphasizing that your scars make you who you are and they each tell their own little story about your life. The turning point of the memior would be when the author realizes that scars are something that you should take pride in and that they should in a way be celebrated. The author shows that he has changed at this point by showing that he has had a change of mindset about his own scars.
"On a hill in the neighborhood where I grew up, in Kansas City, was a suburban ruin that my friends and I called the Burned-Down House. There was a crumbling tennis court, which was enclosed by an overgrown chain-link fence, and there was a concrete slab with a dirt-floored crawl space underneath it, and there were two limestone chimneys. During the summer of 1972, when I was in high school, my friend Duncan and I sat on top of one of the chimneys lighting firecrackers with our cigarettes and throwing them at two other friends, who were sitting on a limestone retaining wall and throwing firecrackers at us. Between explosions, we tried to think of something less boring to do. Most of our firecrackers were Black Cats, but we had some cherry bombs, too, and one of those blew up a few inches above my left foot. When I could hear again, and when Duncan and I had stopped laughing, I noticed a nickel-size piece of cherry-bomb shrapnel embedded in the rubber toe cap of my sneaker. When I pulled on it, it came out of my foot like a cork, and blood spread up through the canvas and into the laces. Duncan drove me to the office of my doctor, a pediatrician. The waiting room was full of mothers and weepy three-year-olds, and I took off my shoe and handed it to the receptionist, to show her what the problem was. (Scars Owen)"  This paragraph stuck out to me because of the imagery that the author used enabled me as a reader to really visualize what he was describing. I also liked that you could obviously hear the authors voice throughout this paragraph as well as the rest of the memoir.