NCHS AP English Language

Patrick Collins, Kyle Smith #8 5 Tropes

In Chapter 48 (The First Lowering) of Moby Dick, Melville uses poetic devices known as tropes. These tropes are "any literary or rhetorical devices, as metaphors, metonymys, synecdoches, and irony, that consist in the use of words in other than their literal sense." The first trope used is personification in order to describe the sea as "dancing white water." A simile draws a comparison between two seemingly unlike things when Melville writes "...the waves curling and hissing around us like the erected crests of enraged serpents. Another simile is used in comparing the enourmous sound of the waves hitting the ship to "fifty elephants stirring in their litter." Melville puts alliteration (repetition of sounds at the beginning of words) to work saying "hopelessly holding hope here...". The last trope in this chapter of Moby Dick is a metaphor-"The ship had given us up, but was still cruising, if haply it might light upon some token of our perishing, an oar or our lance pole." All of these tropes contribute to the special method of the way Melville writes.

posted by NCHS AP English Language III @ 8:54 AM