Ground Zero Summary and Question Answers
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Contents :
1.Summary of Ground Zero in English
2.Summary of Ground Zero in Nepali
3.Comprehensive Question Answers of Ground Zero
4.Purpose and Audience Question Answers of Ground Zero
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Summary of Ground Zero in English
- Suznne Berne
In the essay "Ground Zero," Suzanne Berne shares an extremely emotional experience of her visit to Ground Zero in New York's financial district. The site where the World Trade Center once stood before the tragic events of 9/11. While sharing her experience, Berne uses imagery, figurative language, and tone to make the reader visualize and feel as she did. By using these stylistic elements, Berne shows the reader just how strong and sentimental her experience was. The author uses her intense description to make the reader feel the same remorse and admiration as she did during her visit to Ground Zero. Berne uses words such as, "incredulousness," "respect," and "honour," to show how the disaster impacted the people. The large amount of visitors and American flags that went up express the feeling of admiration. She also writes, "pay my respects" and "black coats," to show a feeling of grief that was in the air. Seeing the firefighters pull out bodies and clean up all the mess really gave onlookers a feeling of despair.
Berne uses tone to show the reader how tragic and shocking the disaster was to people. By writing, "takes quite awhile" and "it is unbelievable," Berne expresses the amount of disbelief in the people around her. What people were seeing had left them speechless. Berne also writes "great bowl of light," "emptiness that seems weirdly spacious," and "little cemetery," to make the reader feel just how tragic this event was to the country. She demonstrates how this single event caused so much damage, took several lives, but left nothing behind.
Berne also uses an abundance of figurative language to give the reader a better image of what she was seeing. By using the simile, "like a construction site," she basically gives the picture of all the machinery and noise that she later mentions. Seeing all this going on would really catch someone's eye then realizing what was going on. Berne also writes, "dark theater into a bright afternoon," which shows the effect she felt when seeing the site for the first time. With the building being gone, there was a large amount of light that would surprise the viewer. The writer's use of figurative language gives the reader an apprehensible idea of how she felt while experiencing this.
Berne writes "Ground Zero," with the intention to give the reader the same feeling and emotion that she witnessed during her visit to the site where the World Trade Center once was. Through her stylistic elements of figurative language and tone, Berne does an amazing job of keeping the reader interested and making the reader feel as if he/she were there as well.
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Summary of Ground Zero in Nepali
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Question Answers of Ground Zero
A.Comprehensive :
Q.1. What does Berne mean when she says that as her eyes adjust to what she is seeing. " 'nothing' becomes something much more potent, which is absence"?
ANSWER : She realizes what she is viewing for what it actually is. What appears to be a construction site is really a place of a disaster, of the death of thousands. She sees this oddly open expanse of nothing, which after realization, becomes a chilling disappearance of what had been there to fill its place not long ago.
Q.2. Why does it take"quite awhile" to see all the details at ground zero? Why does it take "even longer" to think of something to say about it?
ANSWER : It takes quite awhile for the sheer amount of things occurring all at once to take in and to process, as well as understand. Everything is changing, with so many events going on all at once for 9/11. There is no way to take in the surroundings, people, attire, atmosphere, all at once.
The event is tragic, it takes an even longer time to have an opinion over something so hard to believe and what takes so long to understand clearly. Look at a funeral of a loved one and try to say the correct words for what has happened, you take a very long time to think of the appropriate response.
Q.3. According to Berne, how were the television pictures of ground zero different from the actual experience of seeing it?
ANSWER : From (13) "the collapsing buildings, the running office workers, the black plume of smoke against a bright blue sky.", this is what the entire american population saw everywhere on tv and all types of media. They saw the centrefold of the terror and disaster of this event.
The actual experience of seeing the site is different because it is post-trauma, after the event happened. The visitors are seeing the cinders of a fire already burned low. They see nothing but an, "emptiness right in front of them" (13).
Q.4. How does the area around Ground zero contrast with the site itself? How does Berne react to this contrast?
ANSWER : The area around Ground zero is crowded with many people up and down the streets, trying their hardest to see the sight from far away. Full of tourists, visitors, foreigners and patriotic flags as well as memorabilia.
The site itself is far from full and alive, it is empty, an absence and devoid. A construction sight to the eye at first glance, which then unravels its true nature as the viewer remembers, looking back to the short time before the emptiness of this so called cathedral in a sea of buildings.
Q.5. What does Berne mean in her conclusion when she says that with so many visitors coming to see Ground zero, a form of "repopulation" (20) is taking place? Do you think she is being sarcastic?
ANSWER : This place so empty, a devoid lot missing everything, from its building, to the people that once crowded its space. Having so many visitors file in to just spectate and have a short time being at this place were giving back Ground Zero's full thriving that it once carried. What was taken away was being given back by the many people filling its empty spaces. Berne is far from sarcastic, she had a beautiful inner realization of what really was taking place and knew how true what she saw was. There is no malice, sarcasm, or negativity in what she is trying to explain.
B.Purpose and Audience
Q.6. What does Berne state or imply in her thesis? Why do you think she makes the decision she does? State Berne's thesis in your own words.
ANSWER : She implied her reason for being at Ground Zero and setting her story up with beginning details, implying the heavy crowds for the ending result, as well as the entire story. It is a clever way of having an early backdrop to a story, it is a choice many writers take in writing, to me this is nothing exceptional or out of the norm.
Q.7. What is Berne's purpose in writing her essay?
ANSWER : To describe her visit of Ground Zero and to document personal reactions, feelings, and realizations.
Q.8. What assumptions does Berne make about her readers' ideas about Ground zero? How can you tell?
ANSWER : The author assumes the readers' has not been to the empty place that once was the twin towers, only seen what was witnessed on TV. You can tell this by how descriptive she is in her experience of visiting, saving every detail of what she witnessed in her travel there for others to soak in. Berne's assumes most have only seen the events through media from how she accounts her experience there.
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