Bad Dreams Literary Elements

Bad Dreams Literary Elements

Genre

Short story

Setting and Context

Set in 2010 at a basement apartment in Bath, England.

Narrator and Point of View

Third-person point of view

Tone and Mood

The tone is accusatory, and the mood is whimsical.

Protagonist and Antagonist

The novel's central character is the girl, and the antagonist is the mother.

Major Conflict

The conflict is between the mother and her husband. The mother thinks the husband plans to harm her, but she has no evidence.

Climax

The story's climax comes when the girl overturns everything in the lounge, including furniture.

Foreshadowing

The girl's dream at night foreshadows mysterious actions, including rearranging the lounge while her parents are asleep.

Understatement

The girl downplays the moon's effect on the room when she says the light makes objects seem monstrous.

Allusions

n/a

Imagery

The description of the girl sitting in her bedroom depicts a sense of sight. The narrator says, "The girl was sitting on the edge of her brother’s bunk, trying to pull on her knee-length socks with one hand while she held a book open in front of her eyes with the other.”

Paradox

The primary paradox is that the mother accuses her husband of disarranging the lounge without evidence.

Parallelism

The parallelism is between the voice that tells the girl to disarrange the lounge and the mother’s conclusion that her husband is responsible for the mess.

Metonymy and Synecdoche

n/a

Personification

The book the girl reads is personified when the mother says it is holding her back from going to school.

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