Issue identifying the topic of a sentence


I've been staring at this for a while now and can't seem to decide on what is
actually happening. The sentence in question is:

> さっきから動物に餌を与えるのを楽しんでいるかのようなシンシア

Now does this refer to an actual animal being fed, or is Cynthia feeding
someone like they were giving an animal treats?

For context, here is the surrounding exchange:

> 「ロエル、これ食べる？」
>
> 「食べる食べる、ぽりぽり」
>
> さっきから動物に餌を与えるのを楽しんでいるかのようなシンシア。 何でも吸い込んでいくから、面白いのかもしれない。
> 今ではシンシアの手持ちのお菓子を半分近く消化している。
>
> 「はい、あーん」
>
> 「もちゃもちゃ」

So is Cynthia feeding animals or ロエル?




She is feeding ロエル _as if she were_ feeding an animal. (まるで)～かのような means "as
if ～", which is commonly used to make a metaphoric statement. Lots of examples
[here](http://www.jgram.org/pages/viewOne.php?tagE=kanoyouda).

I guess what's throwing you off is the writing style of this sentence. First
of all, **of course it's a sentence** that fully qualifies as a valid
sentence. However, it's not a regular Japanese sentence that ends with a
predicate (i.e., a verb or だ/です). This is a sentence which ends with a noun
because it only includes one long noun phrase, grammatically speaking. The
main word of this sentence is シンシア, a noun, at the end, and everything else is
a long modifier that modifies シンシア.

In Japanese, this type of sentence is called **体言止め【たいげんどめ】** , a rhetoric
device very often found in novels, screenplays, poems and lyrics (and
[sometimes in a news
article](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/q/36793/5010)). In English this
kind of sentence is classified as a _minor sentence_ (e.g., "Hello.", "The one
on the right.", "At eight o'clock.").

  * [what exactly is "体言止{たいげんど}め"?](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/q/14524/5010)
  * [Major and Minor Sentences (Regular and Irregular Sentences)](http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Major-and-Minor-Sentences-Regular-and-Irregular-Sentences.htm)

So this sentence ending with a noun:

> さっきから動物に餌を与えるのを楽しんでいるかのようなシンシア。  
>  (literally) Cynthia who looks as if she were enjoying feeding an animal.

...conveys exactly the same information as a _regular (or major) sentence_
with an obvious subject (topic) and a predicate:

> シンシアはさっきから動物に餌を与えるのを楽しんでいるかのようだ。  
>  Cynthia looks as if she were enjoying feeding an animal.

The difference is that the former sentence looks more vivid and impressive.
When you encounter a 体言止め sentence like this in the middle of a novel, **you
don't have to translate it as a long noun phrase** , because 体言止め is
essentially just another method to make a regular sentence more interesting.
You can safely treat it as if it were a regular sentence ("Cynthia looks
..."). It's not impossible to translate it as something like "Cynthia, the one
who looks ..." if you like, but usually that's unnecessary.

Some songs and poems are almost exclusively composed of 体言止め lines/sentences.
A classic example is
[ふるさと](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furusato_\(children's_song\)). A Japanese
_haiku_ often ends with a noun, too, although that's so common that almost no
one call it 体言止め.

