Don't Let Me Be Lonely Literary Elements

Be wary of assuming that there is merely one speaker in "Don't Let Me Be Lonely," particularly if that speaker is Rankine herself. When discussing poetry, it is a mistake to assume that the speaker equals the poet. Instead, the "I" in this work must be understood as a literary device that connects different ideas. The speaker calls her own first-person narration a "gear-shift to get from one sentence to the next" (54). It might be helpful to think of the speaker as a messenger transmitting a larger idea, rather than a specific person to whom these events are happening. In a 2006 interview, Rankine herself emphasizes that she and the speaker are not the same person: "It's important that people don't think I had a sister whose husband and children died in a car crash," ("Interview").

Most of the book is written in prose form. However, there are moments when the prose shifts into lyric poetry. There is no specific meter in "Don't Let Me Be Lonely."

In Part 10, the speaker uses a Tylenol bottle as a metaphor for how society has different understandings of adults and children: "On the Tylenol bottle someone has made a distinction between adults and children. I, as an adult, am allowed two tablets" (67). This moment follows the description of a thirteen-year-old boy who is tried as an adult for killing a six-year-old little girl. The speaker uses this metaphor to indirectly suggest that the court was too harsh when indicting this little boy. She hypothesizes, "To know and not to understand is perhaps one definition of being a child" (67). This moment is meant to highlight that there is a disparity in a society that knows it must regulate a child's access to medicine, but will treat it as an adult for the purposes of serious criminal liability.

Alliteration is the repetition of the same letter or sound at the beginning of adjacent or closely connected words. Assonance is the repetition of specifically a vowel sound in adjacent or closely connected words. We see alliteration and assonance in the sentence "The sky is drowning in blue with clouds that billow like sails, a blue sea of sails" (35). The repetition of the "s" and "b" sounds at the beginning of words is an example of alliteration. The repetition of the short "i" vowel sound in "is", "in", and "billow" is an example of assonance. We also find alliteration in the sentence "I can see all the pills, perhaps placebos, stacked up inside even as I am sitting above them" (68). The repetition of the "p" and "s" sounds help to build emotion in this scene from Part 10. Another example of alliteration occurs when the speaker visits the site of the September 11th attacks: "In the overcast, dim light they shadow the dead, are themselves deadened" (82). Notice the repetition of the "d" sound which heightens the emotion in this passage.

As a literary device, irony is a difference between what words say on the surface and their deeper meaning. We see the use of irony in Part 3 of "Don't Let Me Be Lonely" in which the speaker discusses the FAV button on the remote control. She argues that this allows people to choose the reality they can live in: "There is a button on the remote control called FAV. You can program your favorite channels. Don't like the world you live in, choose one closer to the world you live in ... This is what is great about America—anyone can make these kinds of choices" (24). This statement is ironic because it is clear that the speaker does not consider the use of TV to escape one's reality as a positive thing. Additionally, it is clear throughout "Don't Let Me Be Lonely" that the TV adds onto and exacerbates the speaker's feelings of loneliness, sadness, and hopelessness. Therefore, the speaker uses the statement "this is what is great about America" ironically because she does not actually believe this is true.

There is also irony in the beginning of Part 12. The speaker is discussing Diflucan, a yeast-infection medication, with her sister. Diflucan is being advertised as a less-messy Monistat, which is a suppository. However, one of the side effects of Diflucan is liver damage. It is ironic to the speaker that Diflucan is being advertised as a better alternative than Monistat even though its side effects are much more dangerous: "Monistat is to suppository inconvenience as Difulcan is to possible liver damage—What is wrong with this picture?" (77). Even though she is not being explicit, the speaker is criticizing the pharmaceutical companies that ignore the risk of potential medications for profit and that make medications that people will buy out of convenience even if they are more dangerous to the consumer.

"Don't Let Me Be Lonely" is a multimedia work. It blends prose poetry with lyric poetry, visual art, and photography. The genre of "Don't Let Me Be Lonely" is lyric essay.

For the most part, the scenes in "Don't Let Me Be Lonely" are set in New York City.

The tone of "Don't Let Me Be Lonely" is overpoweringly melancholy and morbid. The voice of the speaker is straightforward yet grieving when she recounts the deaths that she has witnessed in her life. It is also angry in some moments, as when she discusses domestic or international politics.

There are no specific protagonists and antagonists in "Don't Let Me Be Lonely."

The major conflict throughout the work is with death. The speaker strives to understand death as she experiences it in her personal life, she watches depictions of it in TV and movies, and she sees it on the news. She understands death as a malleable state that is not simply the opposite of "life." The examination of the gray area between life and death extends across the work.

Because "Don't Let Me Be Lonely" is separated into 18 distinct parts, there is no specific climax in this work.

In literary analysis, foreshadowing is a sign of what is going to come later on in the work. The first sentence of "Don't Let Me Be Lonely" is an example of this. The speaker says, "There was a time I could say no one I knew well had died" (5). Because this sentence is in the past tense, the reader can assume that this is no longer true. We learn later that the speaker has many people in her life that she has known well and who have died. This includes her friend with cancer, her friend with Alzheimer's, her sister's children, and her brother-in-law.

There are many allusions to popular culture throughout "Don't Let Me Be Lonely." Most of these come from the TV. There are also allusions to the politics at the time that the work was written. Some of the most important allusions in the work are the ones about the movies that the speaker watches with her friends.

Metonymy is a figure of speech where a linked term is used to stand in for a thing or concept. In Part 2, the speaker says that her friend with Alzheimer's was moved to a "home" (17). The speaker uses this word to refer to nursing care facilities. Additionally, throughout the work, the speaker refers to "Hollywood," which stands for the film industry as a whole.

Personification is the attribution of a human voice or human action to an inanimate object. We see the personification of cancer in Part 1 in the line, "Cancer slowly settled in her body and lived off it until it, her body, became useless to herself" (9). Leaves are also personified to demonstrate debilitating depression in Part 6: "The leaves on the trees outside his window rattled within him" (42).

Hyperbole is a figure of speech that consists of an exaggerated statement that is used to express a strong feeling and is not intended to be understood literally. We see hyperbole in the statement "we might have been able to do something with the fact that the liver is the largest single internal organ next to the soul, which looms large though it is hidden" (54). In this passage, the reader knows that the soul is not a physical organ. This passage underlies the liver's importance in the body and equates it to the "soul," a person's life-force.

Onomatopoeia is the formation of a word according to how it sounds. We see onomatopoeia in the word "rattle" in Part 6: "The leaves on the trees outside his window rattled within him" (42). "Rattled" is an example of onomatopoeia because it is spelled how it sounds.