SOURCE: Daniel, Janice B. “‘Apples of the Thoughts and Fancies’: Nature as Narrator in The Scarlet Letter.” ATQ: Nineteenth‐Century American Literature and Culture n.s. 7, no. 4 (December 1993): 307‐18.

[In the following essay, Daniel examines Nathaniel Hawthorne's personification of nature in The Scarlet Letter as a rhetorical device.]

Even the most casual reader of Nathaniel Hawthorne cannot fail to notice his conspicuous and consistent focus on nature. Through his description of natural surroundings as well as his use of figurative language, he works into his fiction a place of special importance for nature. As a Romanticist who gives abundant literary attention to nature, as an individual writer who attempts to remain true to the vision of his own art, and as a human being who treasures the importance of nature in his own life experiences, Hawthorne gives distinct attention in his works to the natural environment. One of the first in the literary field to notice this propensity was his contemporary, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, in his comments on the Twice‐told Tales:

But it is one of the high attributes of the poetic mind, to feel a universal sympathy with Nature, both in the material world and in the soul of man. It identifies itself likewise with every object of its sympathy, giving it new sensation and poetic life, whatever that object may be, whether man, bird, beast, flower, or star. … Of such is the author of this book.

(329)

Another notable comment comes from Herman Melville who brings Hawthorne into close metaphorical proximity with the natural world: “For no less ripe than ruddy are the apples of the thoughts and fancies in this sweet Man of Mosses” (241).

Actually, Hawthorne's recognition of the extraordinary attributes of nature stems from a quite personal viewpoint. The American Notebooks reveals his individual veneration for nature's handiwork:

Man's finest workmanship, the closer you observe it, the more imperfections it shows. … Whereas, what may look coarse and rough in Nature's workmanship will show an infinitely minute perfection, the closer you look into it. The reason of the minute superiority of Nature's work over man's is, that the former works from the innermost germ, while the latter works merely superficially.

(VIII:157‐158)

On a literal level, this passage reveals a writer's admiration for his natural surroundings and his humble acknowledgment of his own human inadequacies. However, if we explore his focus on nature in his fiction, we understand what this writer has managed to accomplish. In his own “superficial” approach to his human “workmanship,” he has incorporated an individual approach to the literary treatment of nature which becomes an “innermost germ” that grows vital to his art and to our appreciation of it.

One such “innermost germ” has received little critical attention, yet it marks Hawthorne's use of nature in fiction as being distinctly different from other writing of the times and enables the reader to study his work with new insight. This particular approach is his use of the rhetorical figure of personification of nature. In addition to his traditional usage of this figure to endow objects in nature with human physical traits, he gives conspicuous attention to the ability of nature to reveal emotion, feeling, and passion. For example, his trees groan in fear, his mountains become angry, his clouds weep, his winds are mischievous, and his waves laugh. This “literary” feature lends a more “human” aspect to Hawthorne's fiction which impresses the reader with a strong sense of voice as if the author wishes to have nature interact with his fictional characters. Because this feat is implausible, he utilizes nature personification as a device for narrative voice which provides disembodied, personal attitudes which would otherwise not be present. This voice can be sympathetic, judgmental, ironic, warm, or harsh; it may criticize, approve, question, or confirm. As Reuben leaves the dying Roger Malvin, for example, sensitivity is provided by “a gloom on Nature's face, as if she sympathized with mortal pain and sorrow” (X:345‐346); or deference is displayed when Reverend Hooper's veil is never blown aside by a wind which “respected his dreadful secret” (IX:48).

Whatever the various particular slants, Hawthorne's use of personification as a narrative device displays both a pattern and a purpose. This imagery is a vehicle with which the author reveals to his reader the underlying message of his consistent theme of community—especially the communities of man and nature—and he brings these two worlds into closer proximity than his critics have previously recognized. The words of his narrator in the essay “Snow‐flakes” give some insight into his intentions: “Would it [the wind] might inspire me to sketch out the personification of a New‐England winter! And that idea, if I can seize the snow‐wreathed figures that flit before my fancy, shall be the theme of the next page” (IX:346). In fact, personification plays a crucial part in developing his theme of community in more than a few of his pages.

An analysis of The Scarlet Letter reveals an author who thematically juxtaposes the communities of humankind and nature. Pearl, who is ostracized from her community of humans, is received into nature's community by personified sunshine which is “glad of such a playmate” (I:184); and Hester, who likewise experiences isolation, finds approval in a natural environment where each green leaf is gladdened by “a sudden smile of heaven” reflected in the merry gleam of a little brook (I:203). In his article, “Personification and Community,” Clifford Siskin explains how this rhetorical figure can be the appropriate choice for such a theme:

The personification of human faculties or attributes requires the transplantation of a part from the body of the individual (e.g., each man's reason) to the body of the community (e.g., reason as a standard faculty shared by all). Personifying and generalizing are, in that sense, interrelated processes. In rhetorical terms, personifications of this sort function as a synecdochic affirmation of community; the parts personified stand for the uniformity of their wholes.

(377)

Nature personification, for Hawthorne, is an effective vehicle with which to bridge the gap between the community of humankind and the community of nature, and through his figurative manipulation of nature's ability to provide additional perspective, Hawthorne finds an expression for his theme without making direct authorial comments.

Admittedly, many readers of his fiction have learned to be alert to an elusive authorial presence, but as we become more aware of the role of personification in his work, we discover that the authorial presence is not so much elusive as it is placed into another voice. Many studies of narrative support the idea that a disembodied voice can be an effective device which allows the narrator to have two differing perspectives. John D. Kalb explains that one type of appropriate narrator is one who has free access to the roles of both participant and spectator in an event. “Removal of oneself from the scene of that event is necessary for the clear and fruitful observation and understanding for the event and one's participation in it” (169), and the advantage is that the story may be experienced first‐hand, yet the spectator's distance “allows and warrants observation, speculation, and evaluation from without” (170). Like the narrator in “Sights from a Steeple,” who calls himself “a watchman, all‐heeding and unheeded” (IX:192), personified nature has the similar vantage point of being both present yet inconspicuous. We sense an additional consciousness, for example, when Pearl's desperate shrieks, upon seeing her mother and the minister at the brook, cause the woods to reverberate around her “as if a hidden multitude were lending their sympathy and encouragement” (I:210). For the moment, authorial presence steps aside and lets nature provide appropriate reactions.

In addition, Gerard Genette's discussion of voice defines two narrative postures—the heterodiegetic narrator who is absent from the story and the homodiegetic narrator who can be present as a secondary character (243‐247). While Hawthorne does not project natural objects as characters into his fiction, his use of personification closely approaches a combination of Genette's two definitions: as narrating author, he is absent from the events, but he often hands over narrative perspective to nature which becomes a temporary secondary entity. When Hawthorne, as narrator, relates the tenuous encounter between Hester and Dimmesdale in the forest, but at the same time provides additional perspective from groaning old trees above them, he distances himself from the situation yet provides effective emotional commentary.

In the plentiful amount of modern critical theories of narrative technique, there appears to be an absence of a consideration of nature imagery as a possibility for additional perspective. Wayne Booth's analysis of distance and point of view suggests one type of narrator which closely approaches what Hawthorne accomplishes with personification. He describes the “implied author” who amounts to the author's “second self” which “is usually a highly refined and selected version, wiser, more sensitive, more perceptive than any real man could be” (175). Although Booth is exploring the field of human voices, this second self is apparent in Hawthorne's transferal of perspective to the natural environment in which his characters enact their human dramas.

The human dramas which transpire in Hawthorne's fiction have long been recognized as those in which he develops his theme of the importance of community. In The Scarlet Letter, Hester's entire ordeal begins with her ostracism from participation in the mainstream of mankind, but as she turns her face toward the assembly of humanity in the marketplace, she senses “that whatever sympathy she might expect lay in the larger and warmer heart of the multitude” (I:64‐65). Ironically, the most pronounced sensitivity emanates, not from the human community, but from the natural environment. Whereas Hawthorne's theme of community characteristically plays itself out in his works with the interactions of humans, in this novel and on another level he further emphasizes his message by depicting nature in a community of its own, in an existence parallel to humankind's emotional and intellectual world. No emotional or intellectual interactions with humans occur; however, nature's close proximity to humans allows it to supply an additional perspective on the human dilemmas. The two communities are juxtaposed as occupying the same physical spaces, but no interaction takes place. Frequently, Hawthorne's use of personification hints at nature's desire to reach out to humans, to make attempts at bringing the two worlds closer together; but, for the most part, humankind's community and the natural community are separate, parallel entities, with personification of nature becoming the narrative voice which establishes this situation and yet bridges the gap. In Hawthorne's parallel arrangement of the worlds of nature and humans, he allows his reader to experience them both together as he uses both to enhance theme.

This process begins immediately in Chapter One, “The Prison Door”:

But, on one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rose‐bush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came forth to his doom in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him.

(I:48)

Hawthorne promptly establishes a voice which expresses a commentary in the form of sympathy and kindness, attitudes which are absent from the human element in the scene. The rose bush is nature's means of communicating these feelings, and personification is the author's means of speaking to his reader. As he proceeds to narrate his “tale of human frailty and sorrow” (I:48), he consistently employs personification of nature as a special narrative device which provides a voice in addition to—or in place of—his own. Using this rhetorical figure provides an additional strategy with which he can be the elusive author who lets not a character but nature provide additional perspectives. One point of view may be from a forest whose heart rejoices at Hester's temporary separation from the letter; another may be voiced by a brook which mournfully laments an ominous future event; or yet another may be one of approval from sunshine which favors Pearl rather than her mother. When these various voices, perspectives, attitudes, or moods are examined, they consistently draw attention to nature as a community juxtaposed to the community of humans.

Many times in the novel, the human community is broken into two separate entities—the macrocosm of the Puritans of Boston and the microcosm of the alienated characters—a dichotomous arrangement which reinforces the pattern of nature's separate and parallel situation to man. From the very beginning, Hester's world is one which is separate from the community of humans around her. As she emerges from the prison to face the crowd, the townspeople gaze as if they are seeing a stranger for the first time, and the letter produces the effect of taking “her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and inclosing her in a sphere by herself” (I:54). Another noticeable lack of restraint to treat Hester as “different” is evidenced in the behavior of the children who “turn their heads to continue to stare in her face” (I:54). Later, when Pearl is older, it is the children again who gather around her and her mother and “not unfrequently reviled them with their tongues” because they “had got a vague idea of something outlandish, unearthly, or at variance with ordinary fashions, in the mother and child” (I:94).

The children are representative of a community which severs from itself two other human beings who are forced into an ostracized community of their own. “Mother and daughter stood together in the same circle of seclusion from human society” (I:94), a narrow sphere which takes them into the same wide physical spaces as other humans (religious services, the market place, the city streets) but without emotional, intellectual, or social interaction. Walks through the city streets, for example, present them with a populace which “Pearl saw, and gazed intently, but never sought to make acquaintance” (I:94). They are forced into a community of two which is separate from, yet in parallel existence to, the people of Boston, and Hawthorne's use of personification often provides voices from nature's community which is likewise present but separate.

For example, while Hester continually finds herself the target of ostracism by comments from ministers, citizens of Boston, and children in the streets, nature shares the knowledge of her shame yet provides a certain restraint that is absent from the actions of the humans. The natural community recognizes Hester's shame but does not choose to voice it aloud: “… all nature knew of it; it could have caused her no deeper pang, had the leaves of the trees whispered the dark story among themselves,—had the summer breeze murmured about it,—had the wintry blast shrieked it aloud!” (I:85). The narrator is providing an additional perspective—an understanding silence from nature's community—which gives balance to the vocal reproofs of the human community.

With a comparable balance, Hawthorne introduces the adjoining forest, a region where he concentrates our attention on nature as a world which is also separate from, yet parallel to, the world of humans in nearby Boston. The “personality” of this environment assumes various identities. For the nearby civilized community, it is “the wild, free atmosphere of an unredeemed, unchristianized, lawless region” (I:201): a realm for the Black Man, a meeting place for his followers, a habitat for the savages, and a locale for sin. At a time when the early colonists have recently separated themselves from the Old World and all that is civilized, this “precinct of the Devil and his American counterpart, the Indian” (Fossum 6) carries connotations of all that is associated with evil and implications that this evil influence will filter into their territory. Theirs is “a story set at the rough edge of civilization. The dark forest is still ominously near, and the dark dangers from foreign servants, untamed children, stubborn heretics, idle Indians, or hell‐bound witches seem to threaten the progress of Puritan civilization's sacred new orders” (Herzog 7).

One would expect the temperament of this natural world to be hostile to any positive associations with humans; however, quite the opposite is true. This environment affords Pearl safe surroundings in which to roam and play with the freedom and abandonment of childhood; it offers Hester a kindred association for her innate passion and sense of independence; and it furnishes the lovers with a free atmosphere in which to ignore the confines of a judgmental society. It is to the persona of this natural world that Hawthorne many times gives a voice or an attitude in order to provide additional perspective to an emerging theme of closeness between the separate worlds of nature and humans.

The forest, for example, in a world separated from civilization, is where two lovers are allowed to be alone for the first time in seven years without the frowning disapproval or condemnation of their human peers. Hawthorne uses the reactions of a personified nature to portray a more benevolent view than would be issued from the human element:

All at once, as with a sudden smile of heaven, forth burst the sunshine, pouring a very flood into the obscure forest, gladdening each green leaf, transmuting the yellow fallen ones to gold, and gleaming adown the gray trunks of the solemn trees. The objects that had made a shadow hitherto, embodied the brightness now. The course of the little brook might be traced by its merry gleam afar into the wood's heart of mystery, which had become a mystery of joy.

(I:202‐203)

Sunshine, leaves, trees, brook, and woods are not interacting participants in the human drama but have a vantage point in close proximity to the action. For a short while, Hester and Pearl's community of two has increased to three, and the disembodied voices of nature furnish the narrator with an additional perspective with which to underscore for the reader the importance of intimate communion. This method of additional perception closely resembles the narrative figure which Genette recognizes in his analysis of internal focalization; he identifies one type of focalizer as a point of view character—a character other than the focal character who provides incidental information about a scene that the latter is not able to see (197). As Susan Lanser explains, “[O]ne voice is narrating while another consciousness is responsible for the perceptions, thoughts, feelings, or orientation to the scene that the narrator, in turn, relays” (142). In light of this theory, Hawthorne does not present nature as a character but as “another consciousness,” in this case emanating from nature in a forest region which accepts rather than rejects its human counterparts.

This additional voice manifests itself in undisguised commentary during the reunion between Hester and Dimmesdale. The story's narrator fills in the details of the couple's gloom, the obscure forest, and the dreary forest track; but it is personification of nature which provides the human element of sympathy as “one solemn old tree groaned dolefully to another, as if telling the sad story of the pair that sat beneath, or constrained to forebode evil to come” (I:195). In one of the most emotional scenes of the novel, Hawthorne distances himself and yet makes indirect comments to his reader through the use of this effective narrative device which implies sympathy as well as dread.

The reader's sympathy is not directed solely toward the novel's lovers; it is elicited for other characters and for other reasons. When Pearl sees her mother with the minister, she reacts with violent gestures and contortions accompanied by wild, piercing shrieks “which the woods reverberated on all sides; so that, alone as she was in her childish and unreasonable wrath, it seemed as if a hidden multitude were lending her their sympathy and encouragement” (I:210). Again, the narrator supplies the description of Pearl's reactions, and personification provides commentary and focus on the fragility of relationships. Just as Pearl senses that her community of two is threatened, nature lends the appropriate element of human reaction in an environment which is void of humans outside her limited community.

In fact, it is Pearl with whom the parallel community of nature reacts most animatedly and with the most striking intent to communicate. As the child plays alone near the stream, the great forest becomes her playmate: it offers her partridge berries; its wild denizens are not afraid; a pigeon utters “a sound as much of greeting as alarm”; a squirrel chatters; a fox looks inquisitively; a wolf offers “his savage head to be patted by her hand”; and the flowers whisper to her to adorn herself with them. “The truth seems to be, however, that the mother‐forest, and these wild things which it nourished, all recognized a kindred wildness in the human child” (I:204‐205).

She is, after all, “a Child of Nature” whom Darrel Abel describes as one who can “discover conscious and valuable affinities with the natural world and enjoy an active and formative relationship with it” (192). She has been produced by a natural act of passion, and like the rose by the prison door, she is wild and organic, a human child who “could not be made amenable to rules … whose elements were … all in disorder; or with an order peculiar to themselves” (I:91). Pearl's sense of order gravitates toward the natural environment where she is more at ease than with humans. As Abel explains, “Her relationship with Nature was intensified by her ostracism. Her dwelling with Hester on the verge of the forest, at the outskirts of the town, symbolized her more intimate association with nature than with the human community” (195). It is important to remember that Pearl's interaction with her natural surroundings remains on the physical level; there is no emotional or intellectual bonding. Instead, she reflects the untamed qualities of her primitive environment. She is perhaps even closer to the elements of the forest than its savage denizens who come to share the holiday at the end of the story: “She ran and looked the wild Indian in the face; and he grew conscious of a nature wilder than his own” (I:244).

Pearl is therefore more successful than the other characters in being receptive to nature's efforts to achieve some level of rapport with humans. She is alert to the sound of the forest stream, “a babble, kind, quiet, soothing, but melancholy,” and asks it to “Pluck up a spirit, and do not be all the time sighing and murmuring!” (I:186). She senses that the little brook has something to say, and her mother suggests that the message would be about a sorrow if Pearl were capable of having one. Pearl is determined to “mingle a more lightsome cadence” (I:187) with the brook's voice, but this voice is just as determined to communicate with the reader concerning imminent events in the story:

But the little stream would not be comforted, and still kept telling its unintelligible secret of some very mournful mystery that had happened—or making a prophetic lamentation about something that was yet to happen—within the verge of the dismal forest.

(I:187)

In this case, nature's sympathy is tinged with dread or foreboding, and Pearl is the one who notices even though she misunderstands. Perhaps she is capable of being more receptive because of her own “natural” position. Hawthorne does not fully humanize her until the final moments of the story; therefore, having been “exiled from the concrete world of human sympathy,” she does not experience “either the limits or the possibilities of the concrete human life” (Feidelson 75‐76) and is thus more prone to discourse with nature.

Some of the novel's characters are not as cognizant as Pearl in perceiving nature's efforts to establish contact, but Hawthorne's personification indicates that the efforts are present, nonetheless, and that they are sometimes directed toward minor characters. Governor Bellingham's garden has sprouted a pumpkin vine which

… rooted at some distance, had run across the intervening space, and deposited one of its gigantic products directly beneath the hall‐window; as if to warn the Governor that this great lump of vegetable gold was as rich an ornament as New England earth would offer him.

(I:106‐107)

This diminutive detail might appear insignificant until we understand, a few pages later, that the Governor's inability to nurture this plant or to heed its “warning” to recognize something of value parallels his lack of appreciation for Hester's plight. Also, the tenacious vine might well represent Hester's determination at this point in the story not to lose her child. Regardless of any symbolic intent, Hawthorne again depicts nature existing in an untamed world parallel with the human civilized one and again provides a voice in addition to the narrator's to comment on the situation. In its own community, nature tends to be uncivilized and undomesticated; indeed, in this novel, nature is present as a forest and as a sea. There are no meadows, yards, farms, or fields, and the only garden (with the exception of the graveyard) is inhabited by a wild, uncultivated vine. In Hawthorne we see no “precarious semantic distinction between wild nature and tame nature. All nature, for Hawthorne, is wild” (Bell 184).

As Hester and Pearl are forced by a “civilized” community of humans to form a community of their own, the mother also develops an affinity for the natural elements and exhibits a wildness of her own. In her life on the boundaries of town and in parallel daily existence with the Puritan community, she develops an “estranged point of view at human institutions, and whatever priests or legislators had established; criticizing all with hardly more reverence than the Indian would feel” (I:199). Hawthorne personifies nature to reveal the mother's recognition of a similar erratic quality in her daughter's naturalness. She compares the child's personality to “the waywardness of an April breeze; which … will sometimes, of its own vague purpose, kiss your cheek with a kind of doubtful tenderness, and play gently with your hair, and then be gone about its other idle business” (I:179). Hawthorne's fusion of Pearl's disposition with a natural object underscores his recurring depiction of nature's potential for human emotion.

The use of sunlight plays a dominant role in this novel, and Hawthorne's personification of it provides commentary on his characters and communication with his readers. Richard Fogle's well‐known interpretation of Hawthorne's imagery emphasizes that much of it is in the form of things being transfigured and that sunshine is the light of nature which is indispensable as a tool for the author's intention toward denoting reality (36‐40), but the role of sunlight in its approval of Pearl and its avoidance of Hester also provides the reader with Hawthorne's reality of a balanced perspective of two differing viewpoints. “The light lingered about the lonely child, as if glad of such a playmate, until her mother had drawn almost nigh enough to step into the magic circle too” (I:184). Not only does the narrator give the sunshine the capacity to “play,” but he lets Pearl voice the personification of its attitude: “‘Mother,’ said little Pearl, ‘the sunshine does not love you. It runs away and hides itself, because it is afraid of something on your bosom’” (I:183). Consequently, personification fuses with Pearl's comments in order to underscore the author's intent to bring attention to the parallel entities of nature and humans.

Of noticeable significance is the fact that Hawthorne's use of personification in The Scarlet Letter focuses almost entirely on only two of the four main characters—the mother and her daughter—because their world, like the one of nature, is parallel to that of society. The forest and the sea exist on the boundaries of the town just as these two characters are “placed” in a cottage on the boundary of their fellow humans. Just as neither of them can interact with their human community, so nature cannot interact with the world of humans.

However, through the use of figurative language, the novel's natural environment can provide additional perspective for purposes of narrative and theme. With a consistent pattern of nature's perspective on the fictional situations, Hawthorne achieves the romancer's artistic distance from human experience and, in addition, provides his reader with a better understanding of what the narrator furnishes. He transfers his authorial presence onto natural objects which are allowed to observe or to speak for him.

Therefore, Hawthorne's personification of nature is artistically intentional and not merely an occasional or superficial exercise in figurative language for descriptive purposes. His focus on nature is by design and is not to be associated with the extravagant imagery which was popular with many of the century's writers of sentimental fiction—“nature samplers” who indulged in glorifying nature and touching up its qualities to accommodate mood and who “tossed off sentiments like these by the candyboxful” (Branch 145‐149). Hawthorne does not “toss off” figurative language; he uses it artistically as a recognizable and purposeful device.

He is a writer who rejects the artificialities of popular fiction and, instead, calls upon the imagination of his audience to collaborate with him in bringing his artistic creations to life (Quirk 224‐225). By way of comparison, we remember the dilemma of the showman in “Main‐street” when the critic complains that in the diorama, “The trees look more like weeds in a garden, than a primitive forest.” The showman's answer may well reflect Hawthorne's request of his readers in accepting personified nature: “Human art has its limits, and we must now and then ask a little aid from the spectator's imagination” (XI:52). Hawthorne's fiction demands a special type of reader whose imagination can be involved in creative interplay with the author in order to give life and meaning to his narratives (Idol 334).

Nor is his imagery to be dismissed as a tendency toward the pathetic fallacy, as it is neither presented in a too‐impassioned false emotionalism nor carried to the point of absurdity. As he claims in “The Old Manse,” “I have appealed to no sentiment or sensibilities, save such as are diffused among us all” (X:32‐33). Whereas Ruskin viewed the pathetic fallacy as stemming from “an excited state of feelings, making us, for the time, more or less irrational” and producing “a falseness in all our impressions of external things” (148), Hawthorne seeks to produce in his reader a cognitive understanding of logical concepts which he presents in his fiction. If we dismiss his use of this valuable rhetorical figure as merely a contrivance, we may discover ourselves in the same situation as the inhabitants of Ernest's village in “The Great Stone Face”: “True it is, that if the spectator approached too near, he lost the outline of the gigantic visage, and could discern only a heap of ponderous and gigantic rocks, piled in chaotic ruin one upon another.” But, as we likewise step back to acquire a more objective view, the larger picture comes into focus. Just as the villagers begin to perceive a form which seems “positively to be alive” (XI:27), so do we discern Hawthorne's use of personification as an intentional artistic device.

Hawthorne is a writer who does not use imagery as convenient analogy but who goes beyond the pathetic fallacy into using what Edward H. Davidson has identified as the symbolic spectrum—a means of viewing the world as animate and as capable of having mind—in which “the reader, not the characters themselves, is required to see the ever‐continuing drama of these two orders, the natural and the human” (492‐493). Hawthorne's effort to bring these two worlds into clearer focus surfaces in his fiction in the form of personification of nature—a device which serves him well in shaping his narrative and in sharpening his theme.

Works Cited

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