Asked • 10/01/24

What are the rhetorical devices in John Knowles' novel "A Separate Peace" ?

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Anita W. answered • 10/03/24

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The rhetorical device of irony is the major tool that provides John Knowles his classic novel, "A Separate Peace" its thematic beauty because irony proves the following "trusts" are actually "mistruths" or ironia, Latin, from the Greek word eiron, a dissembler in speech,. . . . the opposite meaning is intended, sarcastic or bitingly mean expression are conveyed, according to "Webster's New World Dictionary Dictionary" (714). Knowles conveys reality of war: War is death, disease, depression, and doom despite the patriotic displays and demonstrations of parades, flags, feats of glory, and pleas for fighting for country, community,

Knowles states that Phineas created an atmosphere . . . .without a sense of chaos and loss (202).

]Gene changes his attitudes after the accident. Knowles alludes to poet Hughes when the author protagonist Gene as the Black poet Hughes in Gene "He now loses his hatred, fury, . . . withered like Langston Hughes's "raisin in the sun" (Knowles 202-203 ).

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Anita W.

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More importantly is the generation of propaganda through the manipulation of the media, the control of the organs of the governmental institutions, the newspapers, magazines, the "free press" or academic institutions, the religions, the political, the authority or police agencies, the civil services that handles the distribution of information, and the civil liberties, found in the Constitution's Bill of Rights, and the inalienable rights guaranteed by Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence.
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10/05/24

Anita W.

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Political enemies of peace prosper under patriotic slogans in times of perceived aggression from enemies of the state from World Wars. What was a bloodlust grab for power, Lebensraum, and xenophobic anti-Jewish, anti-gypsy, anti -non-Christian is the call for extermination of the "other" or the unclean. When dictators demonize the other as vermin, it becomes a holy war. So, too, do the characters in Knowles' novel as demonstrated when Gene states that Phineas created an atmosphere. . . a way of sizing up the world with erratic and entirely personal reservations now continued to live, . . . . without a sense of chaos and loss (202).
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10/05/24

Anita W.

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One rhetorical device that Knowles uses in his novel, is his main character, Phineas' love of acting out brave, arrogant part/roles/identities of himself as stage manager in some mock-epic scene as director of "Our Town," an ironic play on a simple down-home production that manipulates stock characters to perform typical patriotic stock figures, completely flat and devoid of dynamic traits. "The Winter Carnival . . . . If he could not enlist . . . .Brinker could not do much without company---he could . . . cease to be so multifariously civilian. So he resigned. . . .His well-bred clothes had disappeared; . . .What are we supposed to be celebrating?" (Knowles 129-130). Finney was determined to breathes into the empty stage-setting of the celebration and spectacle of war, an empty and void dead scene.
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10/14/24

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