A close reading of a passage is different than analyzing a portion of text, yet it is similar in many ways. The candles dropped hot, acrid gouts of wax on my bare shoulders. I watched with my furious cynicism peculiar to women whom circumstances force mutely to witness folly, while my father, fired in his desperation by more and yet more draughts of the fire water they call grappa, rids himself of the last scraps of my inheritance. When we left Russia, we owned black earth, blue forest with bear and wild boar, serfs, cornfields, farmyards, my beloved horses, white nights of cool summer, the fireworks of the northern lights. What a burden all those possessions must have been to him, because he laughs as if with glee as he beggars himself; he is in such a passion to donate all to The Beast.” This paper does a close reading of the above text. It discusses punctuation, diction, features of sound, sentence types, and the sense the speaker gives to the passage.