Whistle Flashcards
Description of the storm as it builds up (Pathetic fallacy)
“The house felt like a ship at sea, battered by the gale that came roaring across the open marsh.”
simile, “like a ship at sea” - vulnerable / precarious / instability
metaphor, “battered” (violent plosives
“Rattling” “moaning” “battered” - onomatopoeia
Zoomorphism and onomatopoeia “roaring”
“Moaning personification of the wind- Sadness, negative connotations
“hearing the wind rage round like a lion, howling at the doors and beating upon the windows but powerless to reach me.” Safety in childhood / danger outside. Compared to this moment, when he does not feel safe
Juxtaposition between previous safety and present danger
“Like a lion” - simile → sense of violence and danger
“Howling” - zoomorphism and onomatopoeic
“Beating” - violence, plosives
“The tumult of the wind, like a banshee, and the banging and rattling of the window in its old, ill-fitting frame.”
Auditory imagery / simile “rage round”
“Steady as a lighthouse, quite alone and exposed, bearing the brunt of winter after winter of gales and driving rain and sleet and spray.”
“Steady as a lighthouse,” - simile → alone → gives a sense of cautiousness
Light from the lighthouse gives a sense of safety and security
“alone and exposed”, personification, hendiadys → foreshadows vulnerability
“bearing the brunt” - plosives and metaphor
“of winter after winter of gales and driving rain and sleet and spray.” - repetition and polysyndeton creates a sense of constant poor weather
“Howling darkness” - synaesthesia, zoomorphism
“catapulting” - violent verb
Description of the supernatural
“‘Rest in peace,’ I thought, but this poor one did not, could not”
Sense of self-correction. Repetition of “not”
“Could”- Modal verb, shows that it doesn’t have the ability to-> Implies that it is compelled by something
Line 39 “…down the corridor. Down the short narrow corridor that led to the nursery whose door had been so firmly locked and then, inexplicably, opened.”
Repetition of “down”
Almost anadiplosis but changed with “Short narrow” adds onto the sense of claustrophobia
“I had simply the absolutely certain sense of someone just having passed close to me and gone away down the corridor.”
“Absolutely certain sense” oxymoron
“The tumult of the wind, like a banshee, and the banging and rattling of the window in its old, ill-fitting frame,”
Banshees linked to supernatural: Irish folklore- heralding the death of family with wailing and shrieking-> adding to sense of tension
Violent language and plosives- “Banging” “Rattling”
“Old, ill-fitting frame”- Unreliability, unease, won’t be able to stop the wind
“I had seen no one, felt nothing. There had been no movement, no brush of a sleeve against mine, no disturbance of the air, I had not even heard a footstep.”
Anaphora of “no” - highlights unease - no tangible reason for his discomfort
“a” (indefinite article), singular rather than plural - emphasises the complete lack of evidence that there is someone / something else there
“Whatever was about, whoever I had seen, and heard rocking, and who had passed me by just now, whoever had opened the locked door was not ‘real’.”
“Whatever” → “whoever” - change in pronoun. Moves from the implication it could be a creature / an illusion, to suggesting it was human (although not ‘real’ so some kind of ghost / hallucination etc).
Rhetorical questions build tension.
Perhaps it was the woman in black? Had Mrs Drablow harboured some reclusive old sister or retainer, had she left behind her a mad friend that no one had known about?
Rhetoric- Feeds uncertainty by providing possibilities but no answer
“No. But what was ‘real’?” At that moment I began to doubt my own reality
Existentialism-> Things he’s seen have blurred the line between what he accepts reality to be and the supernatural
Use of Darkness / sensory imagery
Line 32 “a tremendous blast of wind hit the house so that it all but seemed to rock at the impact, the lights went out. I had not bothered to pick up my torch from the
bedside table and now I stood in the pitch blackness, unsure for a moment of my bearings.”
“a tremendous blast of wind” - intensifier / plosives / metaphors create violence
Plosives “blast” and “hit” gives a sense of danger and violence
“all but seemed to rock at the impact” - visual imagery
“the lights went out.” - symbolic
“pitch blackness” - metaphor
“unsure for a moment of my bearings.” - navigation metaphor. Shows sense of disorientation
“It went spinning away and fell somewhere… with a crash” - mystery / auditory imagery
“No light came on. The torch had broken.” Symbolic. But also literally in darkness.
“Brought me to my senses by scratching a little at my arm and then by licking the hand”
“Brought me to my senses” - usually a metaphor but in this case is literal due to “scratching” and “licking” - sensory imagery
“Calmer and relieved, while the wind boomed and roared without, and again again I hear that child’s terrible cry borne on the gusts towards me.”
“Calmer and relieved,” - comparative - not actually calm. Still tense.
“boomed and roared without,” - onomatopoeia, plosives
“again and again” repetition- Unrelenting, shows that it is frequent and consistent
“towards me.” Sense of direction- believes that it is it is targeted towards him and only him.
“For a moment I was as near to weeping tears of despair and fear, frustration and tension, as I had ever been since my childhood. But instead of crying I drummed my fists upon the floorboards, in a burst of violent rage, until they throbbed.”
2 pairs of hendiadys - build up of emotions
“Drummed” - auditory imagery
“Burst of violent rage” - metaphor
“Throbbed” - onomatopoeic
