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  • Essay / Examples of Defamiliarization in Kholstomer: The Story of a Horse by Leo Tolstoy

    The strangeness helps us break through our old eyes and see the world in a slightly new way. Seeing things in an unusual way will allow us to look more closely at things that people thought were true without questioning them because they stigmatize them as "common" or just "usual." This is the premise of Kholstomer: The Story of a Horse by Leo Tolstoy. Kholstomer, The Horse Story presents the technique of what we call defamiliarization in the sense that it adopts the perspective of a horse to show some of the irrationalities or illogicalities of human freedom. It seems that people make the word defamiliarization unfamiliar or pretend that this word is new or strange to them, but knowing that there is a prefix -de which indicates negation or deletion and familiarized refers to knowledge or understanding of something. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay According to Viktor Shklovsky, defamiliarization is a literary device by which language is used in such a way that ordinary, familiar objects have a different appearance. The importance of this technique is to help demonstrate the boundary between reality and their art. Even though some literary works are constantly exalted for the true feelings of real life, the authors or writers still consider them as a reflective art and the use of defamiliarization will help them remind readers of this fact. In the story of a horse, this is linked to defamiliarization because the author uses alienation to expose people's ignorance about something in particular human civilization and moral value. Almost every part of the story has been defamiliarized because it was told and can be seen from a horse's point of view, which can make ordinary things enchant human beings with a different luster. Tolstoy uses estrangement to such an extent that he provides the majority of evidence for the concept of defamiliarization or estrangement in his essay, Art as Technique. According to Shklovsky, poetic imagery is a way to create the strongest possible impression. His impression is that "art thinks in a picture", implying that the greatest possible impression is achieved when perception is hindered and that the greatest possible effect is produced by the slowness of perception. In relation to Tolstoy's story, the estrangement or defamiliarization can be perceived in everything found in the text, in its content and in its concepts. It makes familiar objects unfamiliar by not naming them. The use of a horse as a narrator is the use of estrangement itself because it is the horse's point of view and not that of a human, which makes the concept and content of the story seem unknown. Tolstoy's work The Story of a Horse begins with a sunrise which is shown in the same way the day is revealed in the story and its description is somewhat revealing. The introductory part deals more with the representation of the natural world, as if the sky rises higher and higher and the dawn spreads wider and the sickle of the moon becomes lifeless, which characterizes the pastoral setting of history. Another is the castration scene which is missing instead of representing it as an empty space. Thinking it's done out of fragility, but this poorly implies that it's leading readers to imagine a horrible or frightening event. Instead of including the castration process, the author excludes it for certain reasons to make it unfamiliar to readers. From the horse's point of view, the world has changed and is becomingrepugnant because it is like a plant that withers and does not accept the effect of castration as an expression of the author's desire to relieve himself of what he considered to be an agony of sexual desire. “Old age is sometimes majestic, sometimes ugly and sometimes pathetic. But old age can be both ugly and majestic, and the gelding's old age was exactly that. This passage presupposes the representation of the word "piebald gelding" but more importantly, it occurs before the description of the horse. Piebald gelding does not seem familiar because it is said in the text that the horse does not know what the true meaning of this word is. The strangeness in which the piebald gelding is described in the story is intended to add a quality of compassion through alienation. But as it is the perception of an animal and the horse had to appear less in comparison with man than in opposition to man. It is up to readers to change their perception of the old, ruined horse and, instead of disgusting him, to become endearing to him. The relationship between the piebald gelding and his mother shows the importance of the scene where he tells about his family background and his type of life. relationship he has with them. Importance as an important contrast in sexual morality can be seen in the story where the mother is selfish because she abandoned her son for her own pleasure and romantic interest. Motherhood in the story shows strangeness because as we all know, the mother is kind, lovely and loves her children, which cannot be described in words. In the story, Tolstoy exposes the greed of the mothers but he is also right because as we have observed, “some” of the mothers also did what the mother horse did to her son. Relatedly, the injustice of the mother from which the young horse in the story suffers on a spiritual, moral level and can even be considered a crime against nature. Furthermore, the horse tried to think about the existence of "private property" and described it in an unfamiliar way. “There are people who visit a field by themselves, but they never walk there. There are people who consider others as their own, but who never see them. And the whole relationship between them is that the so-called “owners” treat others unfairly.” From the horse's point of view, the meaningful relationship between people who own others is not rather the notion of ownership, the horse sees and understands this type of relationship through facts or actions or through real interactions and by the way owners treat those they treat. called "mine" or possesses badly. “The words “my horse”, in relation to me, a living horse, seemed just as strange to me as the words: my land, my air, my water”. This is how the narrator himself introduces the idea of ​​property and private property which implies no responsibility, no action, but only a label. Compared to this generation, there are women who refused to be possessed because when there are men who call women their own wives, but it is sad to say that these women live with another man . It is this affection towards property that alienates human beings not only from other animals we have seen in the story, but even from each other in the interaction between the landowner and Prince Serpukhovsky. Through the use of defamiliarization, the saddle in the story is depicted as a sort of instrument of torture for the horse, as the piebald gelding drifts from it and exhibits a slight growl in which he is scolded and his girths are so so tight that it is impossible to do so. tightened. The former owner, Nester, is named implicitly in the upholstery which renders the scenevisceral. On the other hand, the piebald gelding realizes that nothing can be trusted and that in everyone, horses and humans are the same due to their fickle actions, and that everything is unpredictable and he feels these things but no one understands it, they just do it. intimidating him because of his mottled appearance. The authors denounced the injustice of humans through alienation. Before addressing the passage as a whole, the author separated the phrase "good for nothing" which literally means "trash or waste" and which can also be used to describe a lower entity and when it is applied to certain animated objects. "Nester put the saddle pad and saddle on him, causing the gelding to lie on his ears, probably to express his displeasure, but he was only called 'good for nothing' and the saddle girths were removed. been tightened. Another term is "At this the gelding blew himself" which means to swell or fill out and also has a colloquial figurative meaning "to pout". The latter seems to be a more appropriate response to “tightening the straps.” And this is how the author used alienation or defamiliarization in the text. In the story, the Prince arrives and is offered thousands of dollars for the pie, which he immediately refuses. “No,” he said, “it’s not a horse, but a friend, I wouldn’t exchange him for a mountain of gold.” But these words are strange because they will oppose the turn of fate, thus reinforcing the narrator's assertion on the subject. Just before this, the relationship between the horse and the Prince is very strong because the Prince values ​​the horse higher than human beings even though its appearance is not good for others and this implies a good friendship without any discrimination. The piebald gelding and the Prince fly to his mistress's apartment, where actions and words become confused. The enraged prince then pushes the horse, which is the strangeness of the story in which the readers know that the prince is different from Nester who tortured the horse but they are wrong because the prince pushes the horse away from him. Subsequently, the piebald gelding was sold to an old woman who proves that she is "no Christian soul" or has no empathy and faith in God because of her wrongdoings. Alienation is used in the text from the horse's point of view: “The driver was crying in my stable. And then I realized that tears have a nice, salty taste.” In this friendly scene, where the gelding licks the driver's face to try to comfort him, the most important thing is the link established between "tears" and "pleasant" which gives the whole thing a bittersweet texture. Bitter for the word “tears” and sweet for the word “pleasant”. Author Leo Tolstoy uses the defamiliarization of the word used in reference to the host's pregnant wife, paralleling which is best translated as "hostess" which does not indicate their relationship. It will still remain unclear or vague whether she is a wife or a mistress since the word "mistress" was used. Perhaps it is intended for readers to think critically and dig deeper. The piebald gelding is so defamiliarized in relation to other horses that it ends up becoming depersonalized since it is no longer considered and recognized as a horse as such by other horses. This implied that people envy those of higher status and despise those of lower status. And the expression of being weak, disgusting, the frustration of helpless old age, despair, ears lowered, seemingly accepting the turn of fate. To further expose reality, the magpie narrator focuses on its relativity. The horse evokes the “celebrities” of the herd “all together with their foals, walking in the sun,..