Dec 28, 2009

Silent Snow, Secret Snow | Style

Lyricism
Aiken brought the poet’s sensibility and craft to his fiction. He narrates ‘‘Silent Snow, Secret Snow’’ from Paul’s point-of-view; this perspective guarantees that the author’s stream-of-consciousness prose style will affect readers directly. Not surprisingly, one finds a large number of lyric poems in Aiken’s verse. Aiken also utilizes the material properties of words. For example, the pervasive alliteration, with its repeated ‘‘s’’ sounds, already appears in the story’s title. In addition, Aiken manages to endow his prose with the...