Poetic Brokenness
McCormick throws traditional literary techniques out the window in Sold. Instead of blocks of text, she tells Lakshmi's story in a series of vignettes. The chapters use non-traditional paragraphing (no indenting, just different spacing) and line breaks to create a poeticism—and sometimes straight up poetry. McCormick found that the vignettes seemed to fit a topic that "is inherently so fractured." And this is why we see sentences that break, and repetition that emphasizes certain phrases (much the way poetry does). Check it out:
But no matter how often I wash
and scrub
and wash
and scrub,
I cannot seem to rinse the men from my body. (87.ABucketofWater.2)
And this is why we see chapters that are sometimes just one sentence:
After five days of no food and water I don't even dream. (75.AfterFiveDays.1)
The contrast between the lyricism present in the vignettes and the dark material of the novel is stark. It sometimes feels strange to find so much beauty in such a horrifying and terrible subject, but we do. Do you think it is important for us as reader to find beauty as we read this book? Why or why not?