Images/Imagery Several images recur throughout “Redemption.” Skulls, for example, appear three times to remind Jack of David’s death. At one point, Jack is alone, driving the tractor in the fields, thinking about the accident and his own guilt, his “sore hands clamped tight to the steering wheel, his shoes unsteady on the bucking axle-beam—for stones…
Tag: Literary Devices
A New England Nun – Realism, Symbolism & Point of View
Setting This story about a woman who finds, after waiting for her betrothed for fourteen years, that she no longer wants to get married, is set in a small village in nineteenth-century New England. Critics have often remarked that the setting is particular but also oddly universal as are the themes Freeman chooses to treat….
Mrs. Bathurst by Rudyard Kipling – Literary Devices
Setting “Mrs. Bathurst” is set in an isolated railway car on a beach in Glengariff Bay, South Africa, where the narrator has gone after missing his ship. It is somewhat surprising, then, that Mr. Pyecroft and Sergeant Pritchard stumble onto the brake-car by accident and proceed to tell the story of Mrs. Bathurst and Mr….
Mateo Falcone – Literary Devices
Romanticism and Realism “Mateo Falcone” (1829) illustrates the cruel toll exacted on a Corsican family by the code of vendetta, or feud. Falcone kills his own son, Fortunato, because the son has betrayed a man to the authorities. Two concerns govern Merimee’s style in “Mateo Falcone.” The first is geographical and ethnological verisimilitude; the second…
The Masque of the Red Death – Symbolism, Allegory & Gothic Elements
Allegory and Parable “The Masque of the Red Death” is considered an allegorical tale; this means that the literal elements of the story are meant to be understood as symbolic of some greater meaning. Britannica Online explains that an allegory “uses symbolic fictional figures and actions to convey truths or generalizations about human conduct or…
The Man to Send Rain Clouds – Literary Devices
Point of View The story is told through an objective, third-person narrative, and unfolds in a rigidly objective tone. There is no hint of the narrator’s personal voice as each character is presented. With the exception of the graveyard scene that concludes the story, the narrator does not explain the character’s thoughts, but presents only…
The Magic Barrel – Symbolism, Point of View & Idiom
Point of View Point of view is a term that describes who tells a story, or through whose eyes we see the events of a narrative. The point of view in Malamud’s “The Magic Barrel” is third person limited. In the third person limited point of view, the narrator is not a character in the…
The Lifted Veil – Literary Devices
Narration ”The Lifted Veil” is written in the first person, meaning that the story is told entirely from the perspective of one individual, the main character, Latimer. “The Lifted Veil” is Eliot’s only story written in the first person. Because the reader sees the events of the story only through the eyes of the main…
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow – Literary Devices – Narrator – Imagery
Narration/Narrative/Narrator There is an almost dizzying number of levels of narration and narrators in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”: a) Washington Irving is the author of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. ; b) Geoffrey Crayon is the fictional author of the volume, the one responsible for collection or creating the stories and sketches;…
In Another Country – Literary Devices – Symbolism, Point of View & Irony
“In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it anymore.” So begins Ernest Hemingway’s short story, “In Another Country.” The war he refers to is World War I; the setting is Milan, away from the scene of the fighting. The narrator is a young American man who is in…