Between a Rock and a Hard Place Flashcards
‘Between a rock and a hard place’
- Idiom
- Forshadows the coming predicament he will find himself in
‘maybe eleven or twelve feet high’
- Casual tone
- Shows his confidence and expertise
‘refrigerator chockstone’
- Jargon
- Shows his confidence and expertise
‘ten feet downstream’ and ‘the claustrophobic feel of a short tunnel’
Foreshadowing for the events to come
‘at the lip of the drop off’
- Personification
- Makes the canyon seem more menacing, as if it is out to get him
‘it’s possible for me to stem my body across the slot’
- Stem, across and slot are all sibilant sounds
- It shows how deft and agile he is while he slithers and slides around the canyon
‘Controlling the counterpressure’
- Alliteration
- Emphasises his control and expertise
‘This technique is known as stemming or chimneying; you can imagine using it to climb up the inside of a chimney’
- Compound sentence and jargon
- ‘stemming or chimneying’ are present continuous verbs
- Shows his expertise and his sense of being in control, as well as using domestic imagery to make it relatable which is quite condescending
- It shows how confident he is which foreshadows the events to come
‘Just below the ledge where I’m standing is a chockstone the size of a large bus tire stuck fast in the channel between the walls, a few feet out from the lip’
- Complex sentence
- Shows his expertise in being able to survey his situation, but also highlights the precarious situation he is in, foreshadowing the events to come
‘If I can step onto it, then I’ll have a nine-foot height to descend’
- ‘If I can step onto it’ is a dependant clause
- It shows how he is planning things, further emphasising him being in control
- It also creates an element of uncertainty, foreshadowing the events to come
‘I press my back against the south wall and lock my left knee which pushes my foot tight against the north wall’
- Complex sentence
- Reassures us that he is still in control
‘teeters slighty’
The verb and adverb start to create tension, which is further foreshadowing
‘akin to climbing down from the roof of a house’
- Similie
- Allows the average person to relate, showing he is still confident and an expert as he is trying to make things more accessible to the average person
‘I feel the stone respond to my adjusting grip’
- Personification of the stone
- Builds tension and makes the readers uneasy
‘Instantly’
- Adverb which is also a volta
- Creates a shift in tone from confident and in control to fear and chaos
‘round rocks below’
- Alliteration
- Highlights how treacherous the situation is
‘Fear shoots my hands over my head’
- Passive sentence (it is being done for him)
- Juxtaposition to him being in control just moments ago
- Shows how severe the moment is, and how out of control he is
‘The next three seconds play out at a tenth of their normal speed’
- Temporal language
- Slows down the pace, emphasising the horror of the moment
‘As if I’m dreaming’
- Similie
- Shows the trance-like state he is in and emphasises the severity of the moment
‘rock richochets’
- Alliterations
- Highlights the violence and chaos of the moment
‘The boulder then crushes my right hand and ensnares my right arm’
- Personification of the boulder
- Makes the boulder seem to have malicious intent
‘the wrist, palm in, thumb up, fingers extended’
- Asyndeton
- Helps to build up a gruesome image, with each point being in quick succession to the next
‘Then silence’
- Short and incomplete minor sentence
- Shows how everything in the world froze, which is a temporal shift compared to the chaos of the last paragraph
‘My disbelief paralyzes me’
- The word ‘paralyze’ is a juxtaposition to his earlier, deft and agile self
- Shows the impact and severity of the event
‘my nervous systems pain reponse’ and ‘my desperate brain’
- Shows how he feels like he is not in control of his body in any way as it is doing things external to his control
- The synecdoches work to show this
‘grimace and growl’
- Alliteration and animalistic language
- Shows the immense pain and suffering he is enduring
‘brute force’ and ‘grunting’
- Anamalistic language
- Shows how he is reverting back to his insticts as oppose to rational reasoning, highlighting the chaos, pain and desperation he is going through
‘“Come on…move!’ Nothing”’.
- Exclamatory sentence followed by a minor, short sentence
- Shows his desperate plea to get out of the situation, but then shows how these attemps are futile further emphasizing the suffering of the moment
