The Question Literary Elements

The Question Literary Elements

Genre

Autobiographic text

Setting and Context

Set in Algeria in the context of the Algerian War for independence.

Narrator and Point of View

First-person narrative

Tone and Mood

Solemn, heartbreaking, pessimistic, enthusiastic

Protagonist and Antagonist

Henri Alleg/Narrator is the protagonist of the story.

Major Conflict

The major conflict is when the narrator is arrested, detained and tortured by the Frenchmen and detained without any reason.

Climax

The climax is attained when Alleg survives all forms of torture to tell his story.

Foreshadowing

Alleg's visit to camps foreshadows his doomed life in prison. While visiting someone in the prison camps, Alleg was arrested and subjected to torture for most of his life.

Understatement

Alleg's torture in the prison camps is understated. Alleg went through the worst experience in his life. For instance, he was subjected to waterboarding and pentohol injection.

Allusions

The story alludes to the suffering the people of Algeria went through during the war for independence.

Imagery

The narrator's description of his suffering under the paratroopers in the book paints an image of what Algeria's forefathers went through while fighting for their independence.

Paradox

The main paradox is that despite the paratroopers realizing that they were not getting any information from Alleg, they continued to suffer without any gain.

Parallelism

N/A

Metonymy and Synecdoche

N/A

Personification

The prison is personified when the author says that prison houses a quantity of human suffering.

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