Literary devices and figures of speech in “The Sieve and the Sand”

Fahrenheit 451, written by Ray Bradbury, has been recognized as one of the most precious jewels of the English Literature and one of the best masterworks written in the XX century.

Beyond its meditated, interesting, dystopic and futuristic plot; a book, plenty of literary devices, waits for the discovery of its treasure: the ability that it has to enrich reading, using figures of speech, throughout a novel that makes readers ponder about the social and political circumstances in which they live, the governmental system that controls their country and how their situation is compared to the one exposed in Fahrenheit 451.

These ideas are successfully communicated through figurative language; a resource Bradbury uses to create an image of a determined situation in the reader´s mind.

In the second part of his book “The Sieve and the Sand”, Bradbury uses some figures of speech such as:

• Alliteration: The repetition of beggining sounds. For example:
  
• Anaphora: A technique where several phrases or verses begin with the same word or words. Some examples are:
•  I came, I saw, I conquered - Julius Caesar.
•  Mad world! Mad kings! Mad composition! King John - William Shakespeare.
• We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. - Winston Churchill.
•  With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right,-Abraham Lincoln.
•   We laughed, we loved, we sang.
• Assonance: The repetition of vowel sounds in words that are close together: 
  
  
  
• Irony:  Consists on using words where the meaning is the opposite of their usual meaning:
• For example: The Titanic was said to be unsinkable. 
  
• Metaphor: They compare to unlike things or ideas:
  
•  Onomatopoeia: Is a word that sounds like what it is describing: 
     
• Personification: Figure of speech in which non-living things or ideas are given human qualities.
  
• And Simile: Which stablishes a comparison between two unlike things: 
  

These figures of speech make the reader feel vividly Montag´s livings and thoughts, the actions of the book´s society and how Montag reacts to them.