Narendran Sairam

September 16th, 2010

AP English Composition
Murray 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.”