Rhetorical Strategies
#3
Repetition
• Intentional—as opposed to careless or inadvertent—
REPETITION of sounds, words, phrasing, or concepts is
used in literary works to create unity and emphasis.
• Some forms of REPETITION include:
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Rhyme
Meter
Alliteration
Assonance
Consonance
Anaphora
Refrain
Repetition
• Repetition or words can signal a speaker’s
preoccupations and feelings.
• At the end of King Lear, the old king is attempting to
comprehend the horrifying reality that his best loved
daughter is dead, and that he has been indirectly
responsible for her loss.
• Realizing that she will “come no more,” he states,
“Never, never, never, never, never!”
Repetition
• The shock of outrage is expressed by Emilia in Othello.
• She has just heard Othello say that he has murdered his wife.
• She refuses to believe that her husband is guilty, even though
she knows he is a coarse, cynical man.
• Each time Othello tells her about one of Iago’s lies she asks, “My
husband?”
• After her third repetition of the question, Othello responds
impatiently:
– He, woman.
I say thy husband. Dost understand the word?
My friend, thy husband, honest, honest Iago.
Repetition
 Othello’s repetition of “honest” stresses with
unwitting irony the façade of candor that Iago has
used to convince Othello and everyone else of his
integrity.
Repetition
• Some authors use a repeated word or phrase as a means
of characterization, especially when depicting flat, rather
than round characters.
• Charles Dickens did this quite often.
• In David Copperfield, the devious Uriah Heep always
describes himself as “umble”—the cockney pronunciation
of “humble”—even as he scheme with ruthless ambition
to take over the business of his gullible employer and to
rorce Mr. Wickfield’s innocent daughter Agnes into a
loveless marriage.
Dickens
• Dickens often gives a character a favorite tag line that
sums up his or her outlook or values.
• Each of the Micawbers, the kindly but hopelessly
improvident couple who provide the young David with
shabby room and board, each has a favorite catch phrse.
• Mr. Micawber says, “something will turn up” to rescue him
and his growing family from debtors’ prison.
• Mrs. Micawber says, “I never will desert Mr. Micawber,”
even as she pawns their few possessions and begs petty
loans to keep the leaky Micawber barge afloat a while
longer.
Selection and Order of Details
 The SELECTION and ORDER OF THE DETAILS in a
literary work are crucial to its meaning and tone.
 It can be easy to forget that each work is a product of
a series of deliberate choices that the author makes in
the course of drafting and revising it.
Selection and Order of Details
• Read.
• The details imply that the first-person narrator is a teenage
boy: his points of reference are the parent-figures in his
life, but he is old enough to travel alone and to initiate the
contact with his father by writing a letter.
• The main impressions that the details create—the boy’s
pride in the moment and longing for male company—are
conveyed by his eager response to the sight, movement,
and smell of his long-absent father.
Selection and Order of Details
• He is proud of the man’s good looks, and he instantly
recognizes their bond: the heritage of “flesh and blood”
and the sense that his father’s appearance and character
represent his own “future” and “doom.”
• The father’s first actions are aggressively friendly: he claps
the boy on the back, shakes his hand, offers to buy him
lunch, and “puts his arm around him.”
• That close contact evokes Charlie’s humorous simile
comparing his relish of his father’s admittedly “rank” blend
of smells to his mother’s pleasure in “sniffing a rose.”
Selection and Order of Details
 The self-deprecating humor acknowledges his
realization that his reaction is excessive.
 At the same time, his wish, repeated three times, that
he could have some means to enshrine the moment
suggests the loneliness of the fatherless boy and his
fervent need for the relationship to be sustained.
Selection and Order of Details
 Other details qualify the largely joyous tone of the
passage and provide ominous foreshadowing.
 It is not the father but “his secretary” who responds
to the boy’s letter, and then only with factual
information about the time and place of the meeting,
as if she were making a business appointment.
Selection and Order of Details
• The wording of the sentence about the parents’
divorce shows that the mother initiated the action,
and that Charlie has had no contact with his father in
the intervening three years.
• The last fact is more surprising, given the man’s
extroverted nature and his seeming eagerness to
claim Charlie as his “boy” at their moment of
meeting.
Selection and Order of Details
• Another troubling factor is the order in which the narrator
lists the various scents emanating from his father:
– The first is that of “whiskey”
• This seems especially ominous giving the time of day—noon,
which means that the drinking must have taken place in the
morning
– The nature of the occasion—the first reunion of father and
son after a three-year hiatus.
• Such selection and order of details foreshadow the
disillusioning course that the encounter will take.
Selection and Order of Details
• Read.
• The rawness of the narrator’s grief is revealed
through Hall’s skillful selection of details that describe
his self-imposed isolation, the plodding pace of his
days, and his efforts to will himself to carry out the
minimum of necessary tasks: walking the dog, paying
the bills, appeasing hunger with a frozen meal, and
mechanically turning the pages of a long novel whose
title ironically suggests his own feelings of emptiness.
Selection and Order of Details
 Interspersed with the account of those tedious
actions are the details that show the real focus of his
attention: the recent death of his beloved.
 That revelation comes at the end of the first stanza,
when the narrator measures time by the number of
weeks it has been since they received the fatal
prognosis.
Selection and Order of Details
 His anguish is confirmed by several details: his bitterly
ironic description of her car as parked beside her late
mother’s in a “dead women’s used car lot”; the
obsessive memory of “watching her die” that
disrupts his ability to read; and his conclusion with still
another detail that marks the passage of time from
the date of her death.
Selection and Order of Details
 The repetition of Wednesday makes the days seem
like a prison sentence, monotonous in their dreariness
and isolation.
 By the end of the poem, the irony of the seemingly
upbeat title emerges: rather than a happy account of
the Fourth of July, the “letter” is a poignant
apostrophe, addressed to the narrator’s dead wife.
Epiphany
 An EPIPHANY (from the Greek word for “to manifest”
or “to show”) means a sudden, overwhelming insight
or revelation evoked by a commonplace object or a
scene in a poem or a work of fiction.
 First introduced by James Joyce
 He defines it as a “sudden spiritual manifestation” of
the significance of a commonplace object or scene.
Epiphany
• I A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the protagonist,
Stephen Dedalus, struggles with a conflict between
conforming to the moral strictures of his Jesuit education
and breaking free to devote himself to his writing and to
the expression of his sexual passion.
• He meets a young girl and he is struck with “the wonder of
mortal beauty” and conveys on the girl “the worship of his
eyes.”
• She returns his gaze and he experiences an epiphany:
Epiphany
Her image had passed into his soul for ever and
no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy. Her
eyes had called him and his soul had leaped at the call.
To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of
life! A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of
mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts
of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy
the gates of all the ways of error and glory.
Epiphany
• Only the imagery of religion seems adequate to Stephen to
convey the “holy silence of his ecstasy.”
• The sight has altered his “soul” for eternity: he sees the girl
as a “wild angel” who represents access to both the “ways
of error”—the human path—and of “glory”—the divine
transfiguration of such earthly beauty that he now feels
empowered to celebrate in his work.
Epiphany
• Joyce reserves epiphanies for major characters, whose
self-awareness or intuitive understanding makes them
more round, and enhances their central roles in the
narrative.
• Other writers who use epiphany include:
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Katherine Mansfield
Virginia Woolf
William Faulkner
Flannery O’Connor
John Cheever
Raymond Carver