Michael Crichton uses different literary devices in his 1990 science fiction novel Jurassic Park, the novel that inspired the blockbuster film series. The book is 400 pages long and filled with memorable quotes. Let's take a look at some of them and analyze the literary devices they contain.

Alliteration is the repetition of a starting letter or sound in a series of words. There are a few examples of alliteration in the following quote by Dr. Ian Malcolm:

“Consider cotton prices," Malcolm said. "There are good records of cotton prices going back more than a hundred years. When you study fluctuations in cotton prices, you find that the graph of price fluctuations in the course of a day looks basically like the graph for a week, which looks basically like the graph for a year, or for ten years. And that's how things are. A day is like a whole life. You start out doing one thing, but end up doing something else, plan to run an errand, but never get there...And at the end of your life, your whole existence has that same haphazard quality, too. Your whole life has the same shape as a single day.”

This quote also contains a simile, as Malcolm compares a single day to an entire life.

A metaphor is also a comparison, but without the words "like" or "as."

Discovery is always rape of the natural world. Always.

This metaphor is used to show that discovery, while great, can also lead to destruction and can be more violent or harmful than good.

Malcolm is a verbose character, and we can find examples of figurative language in many of his quotes.

"Dr. Malcolm," Hammond explained, "is a man of strong opinions."
"And mad as a hatter," Malcolm said cheerfully.

This is an allusion, as Malcom indirectly references the Mad Hatter in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

Polysyndeton is a literary device often used poetically or for rhetorical purposes. Polysyndeton is the repetition of connecting words, used frequently and close together for dramatic effect. One example of this in Jurassic Park is in the following quote:

A hundred years ago, we didn't have cars and airplanes and computers and vaccines...It was a whole different world.

Repetition of "and" emphasizes the list of discoveries to highlight how the world has changed.

Repetition is a literary device that emphasizes a certain point by highlighting the repeated words.

Because the history of evolution is that life escapes all barriers. Life breaks free. Life expands to new territories. Painfully, perhaps even dangerously. But life finds a way.