Art features and stylistic devices of the novel Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury.

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Art features and stylistic devices of the novel “Dandelion Wine” by Ray Bradbury.

“Dandelion Wine” is the story of a summer, but it is also a story about people's lives and what it means to live. Douglas Spaulding is the central character in the book, and the great challenge that he faces over the course of the summer is coming to terms with life. This book is about the childhood from within, it really impressed me, showed the other side of our life. “Dandelion Wine” is a series of short stories loosely connected to summer occurrences, with Douglas and his family as recurring characters. But this book is interested not only for its plot, but for reach stylistic devices, used by the author to emphasize lots of interesting moments, emotions of characters and connections between some different short stories in the book.

There are three main plans in the novel: childish (by Douglas’ eyes), author’s (his reasoning) and outward (pictures of town’s life, parables). They are all shown differently. Childish is more adventurous, it’s shown with the aid of dialogs between children (lots of exclamation marks, short phrases, interjections, slang words, pauses and dots).  Author’s plan is made with meditations and reasoning, that’s why its language is philosophical, it contains lots of long sentences, rich epithets, different metaphors and some other stylistic devices. Outward plan consists of different parables and single stories. The language of every little novel depends on its plot. For example, the novel about The Lonely One and his victims is written in detective style of waiting, pursuit and fear, it’s a typical “horror story” with lots of expression, short sentences. The novel about wrangle of Mrs. Goodwater and Elmira Brown, a high-strung woman, is a great example of witty satire. The novel about meetings of Bill Forrester and Helen Loomis is made like the poetry in the prose – its language is high, lightly sad.

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It seems interesting for me to dwell on the first and second plans, because they fully characterize and reveal the main hero of the book.

First plan, as it was already mentioned, contains dialogs, diary notes and dreams. Second contains inside dialogs, outward appearance of the hero (by other characters’ eyes).

Douglas’ dreams have an important function in the book. They fix metaphoricalness of his thinking and strengthen everything he saw in fantastic images. Dreams during the illness are distinguished with absurdity but at the same time they are bright, symbolic.

It is metaphorical and metaphysical comprehension ...

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