Out of Africa Analysis

Sorry, We're All Out of AfricaThere is no mistaking it, and it's not a metaphor for anything else. This memoir is about Africa. To be specific, the colony of British East Africa, in what is present...

The Baroness Blixen has taken over open-mic night and no one else is getting a turn. Check out the I's and my's in this quote, which is fairly representative: "If I had had the capital, I thought,...

Yep, that's it. It's a memoir, which is a piece of a life-story, told by the person who lived it. That's why it doesn't fit into any of the fiction genres you might be used to seeing here. So how d...

The narrator, Baroness Blixen, definitely sets herself up as the know-it-all when it comes to Africa, or at least her little corner of it. She calls 'em like she sees 'em, and doesn't really leave...

Somebody forgot to tell the Baroness about the semicolon, the period, or the conjunctions in English. She is the queen of the run-on sentence, piling on clause after clause with mere commas to join...

The title is Out of Africa, when it all takes place in Africa—what's up with that? The narrator isn't from there, and doesn't really bring anything back out of Africa with her, except her memorie...

Equitare, Arcum tendere, Veritatem dicere —HerodotusThe motto, in Latin, translates to: To ride, shoot straight, and tell the truth. It's Karen Blixen's personal motto, which is really not a bad...

The very last line of the memoir is when the Baroness looks back at the Ngong Hills from the railway station at Samburu. She sees where her farm lies, and that "the outline of the mountain was slow...

Once you get used to the foreign place-names and get into the groove of the foreign languages that just creep in whenever they feel like it, you'll enjoy the burn of the steep climb. And the views...

Mama AfricaThe narrator, Baroness Blixen, has a coffee farm in the highlands of East Africa, which she describes in great detail. We know it's the exposition because she does a lot of exposing— d...

Anticipation Stage and 'Fall' into the Other WorldThe opening chapter, which really revels in the descriptions of the beauty and landscapes of East Africa, are not only the narrator's fall but th...

This book doesn't really follow the classic three-plot structure, but we'll give it a try. Act I would be everything that happens to establish our idea of what the farm is like and what Africa and...

The Baroness' mysterious husband was her cousin, Bror Blixen. (Source)You can visit the farmhouse where Karen Blixen lived; it's now a museum in Kenya. (Source) And if you can't make it to Ken...

Yes, Denys and the Baroness are lovers, but you would never know it by the discreet way she describes him as her "friend". You could easily read this aloud to the Flanders kids and, even if they mi...

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound (1.2.12, 3.8.46)La Fontaine's Fables (1.2.21)Heinrich Heine, "They Gave Me Counsel and Words to the Wise" (1.2.22)Homer, The Odyssey (1.3.28-51, 5.4.6)Genes...