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Rhetorical Techniques In Montana 1948 By Larry Watson

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The secrets showed by the rhetorical techniques
Larry Watson, in Montana 1948, presents a story of a family that not only Wesley Hayden, as the sheriff of the town and the brother of the accused doctor, but the whole family struggles between the family loyalty and justice. Watson develops each character through own ethical dilemmas and the way they deal with those dilemmas. Since the novel starts with an unexpected event or secret of Uncle Frank, Watson organizes the whole novel in a fast and depressing rhythm. To make the novel more interesting to readers, Watson applies the rhetorical techniques such as symbol and parallelism to render the tense atmosphere and further expressed the characters’ inner mind.
The symbol is a key technique Watson …show more content…

David screams, “I could have walked right past our house, down the length of Green Avenue and right out of Bentrock. I could have kept going and never returned, out of my town, away from my family, away from my childhood. I could have kept going and taken with me the truth of what had happened in that house” (87). At here, David says “I could have” for three times to indicate that he wants to find a place to bury the secret forever. As a twelve-years-old boy, David has no power in the whole event, but unfortunately, he knows everything that has happened. David may wonder if he buries the secret or hides the secret forever, he could have his childhood back, have his family back, and have his peaceful life back. The parallel construction of “I could have” sentences show David’s fear of the dirty truth of the family, and the content gives readers a more intense and stronger feeling than other content does. Due to the parallel structure, David’s fear of the secret is very impressive for readers, it foreshadows that David wants his life back to normal, thus it helps readers to understand why at the end David concludes “that Uncle Frank’s suicide had solved all our problem” (161). Overall, Watson writes two parallel structure sentences like “I didn’t want to see…” and “I could have…” to analyze David’s inner world, thereby shedding light on the characterization of a twelve-years-old boy, indicating that David was forced to grow up during this

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