In literature and writing, stylistic devices are a variety of techniques used to give an auxiliary meaning, idea, or feeling.
For example, in Dickens' Great Expectations, Miss Havisham has a sham or lives a life full of pretense.
Dimmesdale metaphorically fades away (dims) as the novel progresses, while Chillingworth has a cold (chilled) heart.
A symbol may be an object, a person, a situation, an action, a word, or an idea that has literal meaning in the story as well as an alternative identity that represents something else.
The symbol generally conveys an emotional response far beyond what the word, idea, or image itself dictates.
An allegory is a story that has a second meaning, usually by endowing characters, objects or events with symbolic significance.
The entire story functions symbolically; often a pattern relates each literal item to a corresponding abstract idea or principle.
For example, in Saki's "The Interlopers", two men engaged in a generational feud become trapped beneath a fallen tree in a storm: "Ulrich von Gradwitz found himself stretched on the ground, one arm numb beneath him and the other held almost as helplessly in a tight tangle of forked branches, while both legs were pinned beneath the fallen mass."
Note also the diction used within the imagery: words like "forked" and "fallen" imply a kind of hell that he is trapped in.
For example, in Ray Bradbury's short story, "There Will Come Soft Rains", he describes a futuristic "smart house" in a post-nuclear-war time.
However, Bradbury mentions mice, snakes, robins, swallows, giraffes, antelopes, and many other animals in the course of the story.
Alliteration is used by an author to create emphasis, to add beauty to the writing style, and occasionally to aid in shaping the mood.
Example: The fallibly irrevocable cat met its intrinsic match in the oppositional form of a dog.
However, this term can also refer to the length of lines, stanzas, or cantos in poems, as well as sentences, paragraphs, or chapters in prose.
In Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner, the first short chapter occurs in the narrative's real-time; most of the remainder of the book is a flashback.
For example, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein uses the adventures of a sea captain as a frame story for the famous tale of the scientist and his creation.
Occasionally, an author will have an unfinished frame, such as in Henry James's "The Turn of the Screw".
This is when the author drops clues about what is to come in a story, which builds tension and the reader's suspense throughout the book.
Likewise, in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart", the energy at the end of the story comes from the fact that we know the narrator killed the old man, while the guests are oblivious.
For example, a person may be described as stubborn or tenacious, both of which have the same basic meaning but are opposite in terms of their emotional background (the first is an insult, while the second is a compliment).
An author's diction is extremely important in discovering the narrator's tone, or attitude.
Some important ones are: declarative, affirmative, negative, emphatic, conditional, imperative, interrogative and subjunctive.