Expressive Means and Stylistic Devices

  

Expressive Means and Stylistic Devices

   Lexical means:

   In this story, the author used a lot of similes. They describe the setting and  the actions of the story: Miss Leeson is smiling in exactly the way the angels do.  Mr. Skidder is putting his feet up against the lambrequins and disappearing in a cloud of smoke like an aerial cuttlefish. It makes Billy Jackson look like the big diamond pin that Night fastens her kimono with. He asked to marry him, and his fatness hovered above her like an avalanche. Mrs. Parker crumpled as a stiff garment that slips down from a nail.  The author also use the simile to describe the skylight room: Its four bare walls seemed to close in upon you like the sides of a coffin.

    Epithet used to portray the appearance of the characters: a tiny finger, said the small star gazer, the faithfullest heart, her fragile body, got two thin fingers to her lips, scalpel of his tongue.

     O. Henry uses the personification, when Mrs. Longnecker speaks with star: You  are millions of mile away and you won't even twinkle once. But you kept where I could see you most of the time up there when there wasn't anything else butdarkness to look at, didn't you? … Millions of mile… Good-bye, Billy Jackson.

     Metaphor used to narrate the magnificent and the brightness of the story: let her heart melt away in the drip of cold refusals, sunk in a pit of blackness, blue infinity.

    Antonomasia: Mrs. Parker be Cicerone of yours and mounted a Stygian stairway.

    Syntactical means:

    Enumaration is used to pay reader's attention and underline the sentence: Capable young medico in his white linen coat, ready, active, confident, with his smooth face half debonair, half grim, danced up the steps. Mr. Hoover, who was forty-five, fat, flush and foolish.