Ap English Essay

Ap English Essay

AP English Essay
Edward Sam
September 12, 2009

The author utilizes a wide array of literary techniques including repetition, diction, and tone in order to relay the narrator’s thought processes and emotions to the audience. Throughout the entire passage, these literary devices are used to illustrate the narrator’s feelings toward Bunny’s death. The tone slowly accumulates suspense as it transitions from one memory to the next in which the narrator reflects on the circumstances of the murder. Repetition supplements the author’s recount of the events that transpired by emphasizing his disbelief on how well he escaped detection.
To convey a tone of disbelief, repetition is used to express the narrator’s incredulity. The word “difficult” is repeated several times, the first at the onset of the second paragraph and two times later in the paragraph after that. It was difficult for the narrator to process the fact that Henry’s plan had succeeded and that their acts had created a situation of such magnitude. The narrator had imagined that Bunny’s death would simply cumulate in “small tears and a quiet funeral.” In its stead however, was all of the commotion with the “state troopers,” “the FBI,” and “an army helicopter.” This tells the audience that the narrator has an astonished mindset when thinking about the inept way they murdered Bunny and the events that followed..
Another important literary device that is all too prominent in this passage is diction, a strategy used to describe the narrator’s mindset after and during the incident. In the second to last paragraph the words “glance over my shoulder for all those years” serves to show the lasting significance that incident had on the narrator. Moreover, the words “the long terrible night and the long terrible days and nights that followed” in the same paragraph demonstrates how agitated the narrator feels about taking part in Bunny’s murder. The narrator had...