In the Exorcist, the author Blatty uses his writing technique to show the emotional ties among characters and how it could affect people’s life, like the infinite love between the main character Chris and her daughter Rogan makes them be swayed by considerations of gain and loss, and also makes them brave and stronger. In this story, Rogan has encountered a strange disease which brings hallucinations and pain to her. Blatty writes about Chris’s reactions and actions to show a kind of parental love which could bring both happiness and sufferings to people.
Blatty adopts some contrast methods to support his argument. Sometimes he utilizes words with completely different meaning to make a conflict through the article to show the complex emotion of characters. “Karras slowly climbed the steps. Smelled an odor like cooking. Like warm, damp, rotted sweetness” (Blatty 50). “Warm” suggests that Karras misses the warmth of his mother’s love while “rotted” hinted about that the love between Karras and his mother slowly turns and go sour. In this way, Blatty shows Karras’ entangled thinking and argues that his love for his mother brings him both happiness and sufferings. Karras’ guilty has been set to be a preliminary.
Blatty also reflects characters’ emotion by environmental description. He argues that describing the environment is important for the role of characterization. “Felt uneasy. There was a strangeness in the house. Like settling stillness. Weighted dust” (Blatty 64). It is known that dust has hardly any weight, but Blatty describes it as “weighted”. Actually it refers to Chris’s feelings. Since Chris is worried about Regan’s conditions and she could not concentrate on other things. This environmental description foils the repressed atmosphere and make audiences could deeply feel about the heavy pressure of Chris.
Blatty is also adept in depicting a character’s reaction to the other character. “So haunted. The tone so despairing and disproportionate to her condition. For a moment Chris felt shaken and confused” (Blatty 73). These sentences are the description of Chris’s reaction when she heard Rogan’s “despairing and disproportionate” tone. Chris feels pain when she realizes that Rogan is under too much pressure. As a mother , Chris empathizes the pain her daughter suffers. Blatty writes in this way to show the infinite love between Chris and Rogan.
Blatty utilizes imply or suggest rather than state directly what he intends to say. “In the middle of the night, Karras awakened in tears. He had dreamed of his mother. Standing at a window high in Manhattan…as he pictured her helpless and bewildered in a maze of tunnels beneath the ground” (Blatty 91). In this paragraph, Blatty describes the scene of Karras’s dream to suggest that Karras feels guilty about his mother. The scene in Karras’s dream is depressive. It is said that Karras’s mother failed to find Karras and Karras failed to retain his mother. It implies that Karras has abandoned his mother and he has to take irreversible consequences which is led by his mistakes. Blatty makes his audience feel about Karras’ grief through this kind of psychological suggestion. Take another instance, “She huskily murmured” (Blatty 105). This is the detailed description of Chris’s tone and expression when she asked the doctor for some good news. The audiences could imagine that she murmured softly with an upset face, and they could know about a mother’s feeling when her daughter got into trouble. Blatty describes the burden Chris has bearded through detailed description in her language, manner and action to tell audiences that Chris’s sufferings is not less than her daughter. There are a lot of descriptions like this to explain how Rogan’s conditions could deeply affect Chris’s emotions and feelings. Blatty uses this way to deliver his message to audiences that love and connections among people could be proved when they encountered difficulties or in accident. These descriptions of characters are also helpful for the switch in characters’ personality, like Rogan’s great change and how Chris has been changed from a helpless woman to a mother with love and strength.
The audience could know that Blatty also argues that exaggeration and metaphor have good effect on expressing characters’ emotion. “He awakened in torpor, with memory of loss draining blood from his brain” (Blatty 92). Blatty uses the words “loss draining blood” to describe how painful Karras is. He reminds his audiences of the sufferings of bloodshed and bleeding, then the audiences could image Karras’s negative feelings and moods which could evoke the perceptual sympathetic response of audiences. This part of description also partly reflects Karras’s love and missing to his mother which make him be in the midst of pain and sufferings. Blatty argues that love could bring people with both happiness and pain, weakness and strength. This sentence can be one of the supports of his argument.
A lot of descriptions of actions also appear to exhibit an expression of emotion. “Chris burst into convulsive sobbing. Klein moved to the bar, poured a glass of water from the tap and walked back toward Chris…she sighed tremulously, wiping at her eyes with the knuckle of a finger” (Blatty 120). Blatty does not go into great detail about how Chris’s emotion breaks down, but he writes about Chris’s actions instead. Chris asks for “cigarette” which is always regard as a great tool to make people calm down. Chris needs cigarette to overcome with her negative emotion, then audiences could image how heavy her pressure is. Blatty also uses the words like “convulsive sobbing” and “sighed tremulously” to show the great mood swings of Chris. Since these kind of actions would appear when people are upset or in a great grief, Blatty could easily draw audiences’ emotion through this way.