Narendran SairamSeptember 16th, 2010AP English CompositionMurray Essay Final Draft

Powerful language and strong images play a very crucial part in Murray’s “The Stranger in the Photo is me”, and allow Murray to convey his one request from life through changing tones in the article. The article which takes a in medias res approach into Murray’s life, bombards the reader with the author’s feelings about the picture and ultimately about his life and projects Murray’s wish: for time to have stopped when the photo was taken. The passage is broken into two parts: the past before the picture and the past after the picture and the description of these two different pasts and the contrast between them is what ultimately helps make his point.

In the first part, Murray talks about the picture with him on a “tricycle before the duplex on Grand View Avenue in Wollaston,” and then goes on to the picture with him in a “seesucker suit when [he] was 5 and lived in a Cincinatti hotel,” and finally mentions other pictures in which he was dressed up as a cowboy, a pilot and an Indian Chief before actually focusing on the World War two photo. All of these pictures of the past painted an image of an innocent little boy who had an enjoyable childhood. Furthermore, the language used by Murray to describe the “stranger” in the World War II picture bolsters this image. Murray explains his “disregard for regulation,” and the “touch of dishonesty for a girl who waited at home,” in an almost conversational way which made it easier for me to relate to his actions. All in all, at the end of the first part, I had, in my mind, the picture of a young man who was satisfied with his life and was “eager for the loss of [his innocence].”

The tone rebounds in the second part of the story. Murray dives into his past after the picture and his voice takes on a regretful tone. He explains that he had not known, when the picture was taken, that his life would take unexpected turns. He deplores his army career which he sees as nothing more than “industrial merchandising.” He recalls the presence of his parents and the loss of them after the photo was taken. He laments the failure of his first marriage to that girl that had been waiting for him when the picture was taken. He mourns the loss of one of his daughters; lastly, he grieves his inability to “once more enter the photograph and become what [he] was that day when autumn sunlight dappled the barracks wall and [he] was so eager to experience the combat [his] father wanted so much for [him].” The entire second part is melancholy as suggested by words such as terrible, gross, divorce and outlive. At the end of his rant, I was left with an image of a defeated man who had faced more bad things in life than good. Such an image, so far from and so very different from the image this man’s life left before the picture, is definitely a cause for nostalgia. His ultimate regret though, is the fact that he cannot “enter the snapshot of the smiling soldier who is still stranger to [him], still innocent of the heroic harm man can deliver to man.”

In the end, his frustration with the past is that it is the past and cannot be frozen forever into the present. Murray’s tone both, in the first part and in the second are bolstered by his images and his language. While the first part graced me with the face a happy boy who had a normal childhood, the second part marred me with body of a

miserable man who longs to return to that one day but is “unable to re-create [his] snapshot innocence.”