TOW #4- IRB Post "The Professor and the Madman" by Simon Winchester

Simon Winchester uses elements of great suspense and imagery to show the readers of  The Professor and the Mad Man that the making of The Oxford English Dictionary was no simple feat so that his audience of history lovers could appreciate the story behind the useful resource.  Winchester starts his story by introducing all of the main characters through details of their daily lives.  In the preface, Winchester described a shooting a small town of England, something that was extremely rare in the area.  Slowly, as the story progresses, Winchester brings all of the characters together to show how they all played a role in the making on the dictionary.  This adds extreme suspense to the story, because the audience is trying to make the connections between characters as the story goes on, but Winchester doesn't let us know the connections until later in the book.  After telling a civil war story and how Doctor Minor had to brand an Irishman in the war, Winchester explains why Minor despises the Irish which was mentioned as a prime detail in the introduction of the story.  He says, "...he was fearful that Irishmen would abuse him shamefully, as he put it, and this was because he had been ordered to inflict so cruel a punishment on one of their number in the United States (Winchester 64).  Although Winchester effectively makes the story more interesting by adding suspense, the suspense does not have a large effect on his purpose.  It seems the story is merely a bunch of fictional stories one after another, instead of a coherent story about one topic.  The story is definitely not what I imagined it to be before hand, but it seems that Winchester will have the story come full-circle closer to the end of the novel.