An analysis of Andrei Codrescu's short prose piece "August" would begin by identifying what the text is about. This piece is about the psychological and emotional impacts felt in the height of the northern hemisphere summer in the month of August. The speaker relays a few incidents to the reader: a conversation in a parking lot, visiting a computer showroom, being mugged, and a disagreement with his wife. All of these incidents are described minimally, only a few sentences for each.

The incidents are bizarre: a man, collapsed, staring at a cement parking lot talking about how there are "more leaves on the trees this year" (how does one tell that? And especially when he's not looking at any trees at the time); the speaker is paraded before "a thousand keyboards" in the IBM showroom (as if the man is the object of the parade and the keyboards are watching); when the speaker was mugged, he was so grumpy that the mugger only took half of his money (did they stand together and count it out?); the speaker disagrees with his wife about whether to include August in their household calendar (how would they measure the time between July and September, then?).

All of these incidents are just a little peculiar, almost as if in a dream; as the author puts it, they are "all sorts of delirious phenomena." The anecdotes that the speaker tells reflect back on the piece's opening paragraph: words like "dramatic," "madness," and "overwhelming" are used to describe the month of August. The speaker tells us that talking in short sentences, "in short clips," is desirable. This is why we don't have full stories about these August events, only small snippets The dream-like state of these August incidents is reinforced when the speaker tells us that in August "nobody is really awake."