WR097 E1/F1 Yoder / Fall 2014
LITERARY DEVICES: Montana 1948 (Prologue & Chapter 1)
For your assigned technique, respond to the following in your group:
A. What character is speaking and what/whom is being described? What is happening in the story at the time of the quote/passage?
B. What literary/rhetorical device is being used by the author?
C. Explain what words signal the literary device.
D. Explain why the device is used – what image and/or idea is being relayed? For what purpose? What theme(s) from the chapter does the device connect with?
1. “That’s the way these images coexist in my memory…like a tapestry with every scene woven into the same cloth, every moment on the same flat plane, the summer of 1948…” (xvi).
2. “She came inside the house from working in her garden, and a heart attack, as sudden as a sneeze, felled her in the kitchen” (xvi).
3. “That was our family in 1948 and those were the tensions that set the air humming in our household” (12).
4. “Because she talked to me, cared for me… Because she was older but not too old… Because she was not as quiet and conventional as every other adult I knew… Because she was sexy, though my love for her was, as a twelve-year-old’s love often is, chaste” (14).
5. “Was the sweat mine or hers?” (21).
6. “Frank said he’d do a little dance around the bed. And if that doesn’t work, he’ll try beating some drums” (24).
7. “If I had gone back into the house—to the kitchen, to my room, out the back door, if I had left the porch and followed Frank’s steps down the front walk—I would never have heard the conversation between my father and mother, and perhaps I would have lived out my life with an illusion about my family and perhaps even the human community. Certainly I could not tell this story…” (33).
8. “And how did I know these were my mother’s thoughts? I knew because they were mine” (41).