All But My Life Literary Elements

All But My Life Literary Elements

Genre

Autobiography

Setting and Context

The action takes place in Poland during the Second World War.

Narrator and Point of View

The action is told from the perspective of a first-person subjective point of view.

Tone and Mood

The tone and mood is a tragic one.

Protagonist and Antagonist

The protagonist is the narrator and the antagonists are the Nazi soldiers.

Major Conflict

The major conflict is an ideological one and is between the idea that everyone is equal and the idea that there are superior nations.

Climax

The story reaches its climax when Gerda is separated from her family.

Foreshadowing

The brutality with which the Germans will treat the Jews is foreshadowed from the first chapter when the narrator describes the way in which the German army decided to enter the city and how they began vandalizing private and public property.

Understatement

When the main character's parents claim that the German army is not so bad is an understatement because later they are forced to leave their homes, are robbed of everything they own, and the parents are also murdered by the German soldiers.

Allusions

One of the main allusions presented here is the idea that the German people did not attack the Jews because they believed them to be dangerous but because they needed their wealth.

Imagery

One of the most important images is pained by Anna, a close friend of Gerda's family. Anna described how she and her family were taken away and how the German soldiers killed her husband in front of her eyes. This image is used here to transmit the idea that the Germans saw the Jews as being less valuable than animals and that they were trained in such a way that they did not feel any form of remorse when executing innocent people.

Paradox

One of the main paradoxical ideas is the way in which the Polish people in the town where Gerda lived welcomed the German soldiers and treated them as their saviors. Shortly after these events, the German people began killing and abusing the same people who welcomed them with open arms in their city and homes.

Parallelism

N/A

Metonymy and Synecdoche

The camps in which the narrator lives for a few years are used here as a way through which the narrator also transmits the idea of hatred caused by racial differences.

Personification

We have a personification in the line "the bombs sang their threatening melody right above us".

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