The Child in Time Literary Elements

The Child in Time Literary Elements

Genre

fiction

Setting and Context

London, precise time not mentioned, towards the end of 20th century

Narrator and Point of View

Narrator: omniscient;
Point of view: third person

Tone and Mood

Tone: indirect;
Mood: gloomy

Protagonist and Antagonist

Protagonist: Stephen Lewis; Antagonist: unknown kidnappers of Stephen's daughter

Major Conflict

Stephen's daughter Kate gets kidnapped while they go on a casual grocery trip to the supermarket.

Climax

Stephen's wife Julie summons him via Thelma, to urgently visit her in her cottage. When he arrives there he finds her in labor.

Foreshadowing

"The vision of his parents' youth, their bicycles and them sitting in a bar together serves as a foreshadowing for Stephen. It foreshadows his fate coming at a full circle at the end when he goes the same path where he saw the bicycles to reunite with his wife.

Understatement

"The baby inside her was not yet an entity, not something to be defended at all costs."
-Chapter Seven
Stephen's mother recalls the moment of the vision Stephen had. She just found out that she was pregnant and when seeing the unfavourable reaction of his father, she was trying to convince herself, to understate the meaning, even importance of the pregnancy, until she had a vision of the baby, real, with hopes and dreams of life.

Allusions

"On the walls, instead of framed black and white photographs of the early twentieth-century giants who had made great the name of Gott, was a portrait not of Evelyn Waugh, surely, but a frog in a three-piece suit leaning on a cane by the balustrade of a country house."
-Chapter Two

Imagery

The imagery of dreadful silence that is followed up with Stephen's final realization that his daughter is gone makes for an impactful scene.

Paradox

"He was the father of an invisible child."
-Chapter One

Parallelism

"He was not mad, he knew what was real. He knew what he was doing, he knew she was gone."
-Chapter Six

Metonymy and Synecdoche

"There were other members of the supermarket hierarchy in brown coats, white coats, blue suits, who suddenly were no longer ware-housemen or sub-managers or company representatives, but fathers, potential or real."
-Chapter One

Personification

"The wood had detonated, it was engulfed in such a chaos of vegetation it was in danger of choking on abundance."
-Chapter Five

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