Saturday night happens differently for every person. Some people go out partying, some people stay at home to read. Others, like the boys in the poem “Saturday Night” by Alden Nowlan, spend their weekend night teasing and flirting with girls on their town’s Main Street. Nowlan shows that the speaker of the poem has a negative attitude towards the two boys flirting and teasing the girls through structure, figurative devices and imagery.
The simplest way that Nowlan shows the speaker’s negative attitude is through structure. Nowlan’s poem, “Saturday Night,” is composed of two sentences. Although there are other forms of punctuation in the poem to help the flow of the words, the poem is still only two sentences, which aid in showing that the speaker …show more content…
Similes and a metaphor are used throughout the poem to help show the speaker’s annoyance. On line 2, the speaker uses a simile of “tires like sirens,” which tells the reader that the boys are creating a large amount of noise while they drive. It is possible that their tires squeal every time they turn and the speaker compares the loud noise to a siren—something that is generally associated with a warning. Another simile used in the poem is “their Hollywood mufflers / making sounds furious, derisive, vulgar— / like a bear growling and breaking wind” (13-15). This simile is comparing the car’s muffler to a bear growling, suggesting once again that they are very loud as they drive up and down the street teasing and flirting with the girls. Both a siren and a bear growling are loud and annoying things, especially if heard multiple times, which shows that the speaker is annoyed by the boys’ actions. In the middle of the poem, rather than using a simile, Nowlan uses a metaphor on lines 9-11: “The boys sport leather jackets and Levis, / but that’s their underwear, / the car is their real clothing”. This metaphor suggests that without the car, the boys are basically nude and unpresentable or that the car is the boys’ armor: without the car, they could not tease the girls. The figurative devices of simile and metaphor in this poem show that the speaker feels negatively