Genre
autobiographical novel
Setting and Context
set during the author's first years in England
Narrator and Point of View
Narrator: the author
Point of view: first person
Tone and Mood
Tone: contemplative
Mood: melancholy
Protagonist and Antagonist
Protagonist: the author himself
Major Conflict
The author decided to write a novel inspired by the artwork called "The Enigma of Arrival" portraying two men at a port, one being the person arriving and the other native, to discuss his own emotions regarding his arrival in England, otherness and change.
Climax
The English estate the author found a home in slowly falls apart with people dying or leaving, trees being destroyed, and modernization replacing the traditional mood.
Foreshadowing
"But already I had grown to live with the idea that things changed; already I lived with the idea of decay."
Understatement
"Jack had at first been a figure in the landscape to me, no more."
-understatement, the author's feelings of detachment of the world he found himself in.
Allusions
"The river was called the Avon; not the one connected with Shakespeare."
Imagery
Imagery of nature, traditional cottages and forests is shown to portray the slow change, the slow decay as a part of life.
Paradox
N/A
Parallelism
"I didn't take the person in; I was more concerned with the strangeness of the walk, my own strangeness, and the absurdity of my inquiry."
Metonymy and Synecdoche
"He seemed a Wordsworthian figure: bent, exaggeratedly bent, going gravely about his peasant tasks, as if in an immense Lake District solitude."
Personification
"But more amazing were his eyes, the eyes of this bent man: they were bright and alive and mischievous."
