Back To You Literary Devices

When disaster strikes, two responses exist: lose hope, or find an inner strength to rise above. “Werner” is an essay where the author, Jo Ann Beard, presents the idea of rediscovering yourself, rebuilding a life after loss, and rising above adversity. Werner, Beard’s main character, finds that the only way to truly move on after a tragedy is to take a leap into what is unfamiliar. After a fire burns down everything Werner has, he is forced to grow and become a new man, leaving his old life behind. Throughout the essay, Beard illustrates a man who faces challenges to his sense of self, and who sequentially must change and become someone new to find who he is again. Beard’s use of the third person, candid diction, and conflict resolution compose an elaborate work that focuses on the concept of becoming a new and better person after a traumatic event.

The word “homecoming” is universally associated with a celebration of the returned and is linked to feelings of happiness and anticipation. Dawe however, employs this word ironically as the “homecoming” described in the poem correlates to the death and mourning of the soldiers who fought in the Vietnam War and depicts the arrival of their nameless bodies. Through establishing this irony Dawe is about to effectively capture the brutal reality of war and highlight the emotional trauma associated with its dehumanising

In Barbara Carey’s poem “Returning to the World,” a girl tries to get away from her troubles by isolating herself on the fire escape. The poem teaches us that in order for a person to understand their problems and become courageous, they must take a break from everything around them. Carey uses metaphor, imagery and personification to express this idea.

Hurst uses the mood of the story to convey the character's’ feelings and tells the audience, indirectly, how to feel emotionally

Different experiences affect people in different ways. They can make great memories that put a smile on your face or, sometimes, they can lead you down the wrong road of despair, loneliness, and heartbreak. But it all depends on a person’s way of handling the situation given to them, and those who don’t fare so well sometimes need a boost in the right direction. A war veteran, Tayo, is one example of a man stuck living in the past, unable to find peace to move on. In ceremony, Silko uses the rhetorical devices of flashbacks, symbolism, and story telling to reveal the healing process occurring within the characters throughout their journey of finding balance between his past and present.

After returning from war, veterans often face many hardships. This theme is demonstrated through pathos and logos in both “The Odyssey” by Homer and “Back from War but Not Really Home” by Caroline Alexander. These texts use these rhetorical devices to prove that a soldier’s struggle does not stop when he leaves the battlefield. By doing so, they open the eyes of the reader to the injustice they face.

Within the story, a sense of dreadful nervousness or sadness is portrayed by the way the narrator is seen within our minds as the story proceeds. As the story goes on we see the diseases that plague his body and mind. He portrays a constant state of nervousness, with an almost constant state of stress, as well as occasional meltdowns. One of those meltdowns is due to the hypothetical heartbeat that causes him to confess to the murder.

By using personification, the narrator can treat the feelings of tenderness, passion, and heart as people, which magnifies the importance

You can really feel the despair and grief that the families and friends have cope with, and suddenly you become attached to the memories that are shared. The memories are the most golden parts of the book because they are like the clay that is being built up and once it’s sculpted, you can really see how beautiful the characters were and that sculpture is the preserved reminiscence of the three of them. The author makes it seem like the characters in the story are so real and you feel how they feel in the moment.

Writing in an emotionless style shows how these events affected and changed the narrator. The narrator does not even recognise her own voice and describes it as "strange" and "unnatural". She speaks in a monotone fashion when the past is brought up because she is not sure how to handle it emotionally.

• What are the characters’ emotions, attitudes, and behaviors? What do these indicate to the reader about the character?

Through characterisation, the author is able to express the main idea of disempowerment and also allowing us as readers to feel discontented and upset towards the main character.

The narrator though an educator, is not very good at verbalizing his emotions. He tends to be the person who keeps everything inside

The author of ‘Homecoming’, Bruce Dawe, illustrates and describes the catastrophes of the Vietnam War in a calm but negative tone. Dawe uses this poem to represent the soldiers and the experiences they went through during WW1. The poetic techniques that he used in this poem “homecoming” were Imagery, Onomatopoeia and Repetition throughout the whole poem. Bruce Dawe helps the readers to understand the theme of how war is bad and a tragic waste of human life. This poem takes the readers to a place in time where our ancestral blood lines fought and lost their lives during WW1, in the hopes that future generations would have a better future in life.

Plato’s words, “only the dead have seen the end of war,” are echoed in the poem, “The End and the Beginning”. By employing techniques of repetition, diction, symbols, syntax, caesura, enjambment, visual imagery, metaphor, and personification, Wislawa Szymborska reminds us that the end of war does not signal the end of suffering. Instead, post war marks a new chapter narrating the arduous process of physical and emotional reconstruction.