Rhetorical Device Alert!

William Golding presents his readers with an excellent use of multiple rhetorical devices at the bottom of page 18.  To save you from your much used 8th grade language arts notebooks or from a search, here are reminder definitions and examples:


Anaphora: "Repetition of the same word or group of words at the beginning of successive clauses, sentences, or lines."


Example: "Not time, not money, not laws, but willing diligence will get this done."


Synecdoche: "A whole is represented by naming one of its parts (genus named for species), or vice versa (species named for genus).


Example: "You've got to come take a look at my new set of wheels."


Back to the text on page 18.  Here anaphora and synecdoche entwine with one another:


"Their heads clustered above the trunks in the green shade; heads brown, fair, blick, chestnut, sandy mouse-colored; heads full of eyes that watched Ralph and speculated."


Obviously, the anaphora is the repetition of the word "head," which is also a synecdoche for each of the individual children - they are more than heads.


A case can even be made that this quote includes enumeratio:


"Detailing parts, causes, effects, or consequences to make a point more forcibly:  Dividing a subject into its adjuncts (a separate, less important thing added to something), a cause into its effects, or an antecedent into its consequents."


Example: "I love her eyes, her hair, her nose, her cheeks, her lips [etc.]."


We observe enumeration in the listing of different types of "heads," presumably the color of each child's hair.