Question

Find Rhetoric and Literary devices of this passage from The Box Man.

You can tell by the vacancy of expression that no memories linger there. She does not wear a gold charm bracelet with silhouettes of boys and girls bearing grandchildren’s birthdates and a chip of the appropriate birthstone. When she opens her black purse to pay, there is only a crumpled Kleenex and a wallet inside, no photographs spill onto her lap. Her children, if there are any, live far away and prefer not to visit. If she worked as a secretary for forty years in a downtown office, she was given a retirement party, a cake, a reproduction of an antique perfume atomizer and sent on her way. Old colleagues—those who traded knitting patterns and brownie recipes over the water cooler, who discussed the weather, health, and office scandal while applying lipstick and blush before the ladies’ room mirror—they are lost to time and the new young employees who take their places in the typing pool. Each year she gets a Christmas card from her ex-boss. The envelope is canceled in the office mailroom and addressed by memory typewriter. Within is a family in black and white against a wooded Connecticut landscape. The boss, his wife, who wears her hair in a gray page boy, the three blond daughters, two with tall husbands and an occasional additional grandchild. All assembled before a worn stone wall. Does she watch game shows? Talk to a parakeet, feed him cuttlebone, and call him Pete? When she rides the buses on her Senior Citizen pass, does she go anywhere or wait for something to happen? Does she have a niece like the one in Cynthia Ozick’s story "Rosa," who sends enough money to keep her aunt at a distance? There’s a lady across the way whose lights and television stay on all night. A crystal chandelier in the dining room and matching Chinese lamps on Regency end tables in the living room. She has six cats, some Siamese, others Angora and Abyssinian. She pets them and waters her plethora of plants—African violets, a Ficus tree, a palm, and geraniums in season. Not necessarily a lonely life except that 3 am lights and television seem to proclaim it so.

Answer 1

The excerpts use various rhetorical and literary devices including detailed imagery, symbolism, allusion, repetition, personification, narrative perspective, and tone to add depth and meaning to the narratives.

Step-by-step explanation:

The excerpts provided from various literary pieces are rich with rhetorical and literary devices, which serve to enhance the narrative and convey deeper meanings or themes. For example, detailed imagery is vividly employed to set scenes and convey emotions, as illustrated by the descriptions of settings or the detailed account of the old woman's memories. Additionally, symbolism is used to represent larger concepts and attributes, such as in the case of the recoiled letter, signifying a potential untold story or forgotten secrets. Another common device is allusion, which occurs when the narrative references another literary work, such as Cynthia Ozick's story "Rosa," to provide context or contrast to the current narrative. The use of repetition in dialogue can also highlight a character's state of mind or the mundanity of their life. Furthermore, the personification of non-human elements, like houses remembering past events, shapes the reader's perception of the narrative space, suggesting an emotional resonance with inanimate objects. Narrative perspective, or the point of view from which the story is told, informs the reader's connection to the characters and events, while the tone—whether forlorn, nostalgic, or sinister—sets the emotional backdrop against which the narrative unfolds.
Upon analyzing these passages, one can identify various rhetorical and literary devices such as detailed imagery, symbolism, allusion, repetition, personification, narrative perspective, and tone. Each element contributes to the richness of the prose and reinforces the complex themes presented in these literary works.