Genre
A novel
Setting and Context
The events take place in a time period from September 2003 to September 2005, Cambridge, the USA.
Narrator and Point of View
Third point of view. The story is told from the third person omniscient.
Tone and Mood
The tone of the story is calm, but the events described in it are extremely moving. The mood of the story could be described as unsettling.
Protagonist and Antagonist
Dr. Alice Howland is the protagonist of the story, while her disease, Alzheimer’s, is the antagonist of the story.
Major Conflict
The major conflict of this story is a person vs. disease. Alice has to deal with significant decline of her mental abilities. She also puts up a good fight, trying to slow down progression of Alzheimer’s.
Climax
Alice’s dismissal is the climax of the story. She has spent 25 years of her life working as a teacher and now has to leave because of her disease.
Foreshadowing
Alice’s lapse of memory at a conference is foreshadowing. She has been working with linguistics for 25 years, knows this science perfectly well, but suddenly forgets a word, “lexicon”. Alice gave “the guts of this particular talk innumerable times” and suddenly she is running out of words.
Understatement
John says that moving to New York isn’t going to change Alice’s way of a life. It is the understatement, for people who suffer from Alzheimer’s feel even more at a loss at a new place.
Allusions
The characters of the story are highly educated, that is why the novel contains many cases of allusion. For instance, Alice reads Moby-Dick and works of Jane Austin. Once, Alice and Lydia, meet Jenifer Aniston in a restaurant. Being a professor of psycholinguistics, Alice also reads the Journal of Cognitive Psychology.
Imagery
The imagery helps to describe feelings of a person, who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease and the way she perceives the world around.
Paradox
She knew exactly where she was but had never felt more lost in her life.
This quote shows Alice’s confusion, when she finds out that she has Alzheimer’s disease.
Parallelism
Not under something, not behind something, not obstructed in any way from plain view.
The parallelism is used to show that glasses, Jon was looking for, were in front of him all the time.
Metonymy and Synecdoche
America repent, turn to Jesus from sin!
America is a metonymy for the citizens of the United States.
Personification
The clocks in their home rarely knew the real time of day/
Clocks have no cognitive skills, thus can’t know anything. It is an example of personification.
