A Wind in the Door Literary Elements

Fantasy

The action takes place in the autumn in the small town where Meg and Charles live.

The story is told from the perspective of third person objective point of view.

The tone used in the book is a neutral one.

The protagonists are Meg, Charles and Calvin and the protagonists are the Echthroi.

The major conflict is between the three children and the alien organisms that try to kill Charles.

The story reaches its climax when Proginoskes dies.

In the first chapter, Meg notices how Charles is behaving in a strange way, losing touch with reality and being out of breath. This foreshadows the health problems he will have to deal with in the future.

When everyone tries to tell Meg the storm is nothing to worry about is an understatement as it is later proven that the storm had a great importance.

In the first chapter, after Charles tells Meg about his symptoms, Meg insists she will talk with their mother about taking Charles to a doctor, and to a real one. This transmits the idea that the children were taken to doctors before, but most likely they were taken to people the children did not trust or did not saw as being real doctor.

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A paradoxical element is the idea that Charles’ mother would like her son to be accepted by the other children and be normal while also reading to him articles from scientific books and magazines.

An important parallelism in the novel is between Meg and her mother. The narrator compares the two women and the idea transmitted is that Meg’s mother looks at her daughter as being far older than she was in reality and thus confiding in her. In way, Meg represents her mother as she was when Meg was a little girl and thus through Meg the reader is able to understand the mother better.

The term ‘’read’’ is used in the book in a general way to make reference to Charles’ ability to read other people and understand what they are thinking about.

We find personification in the line ‘’ their golden faces reflecting brilliance’’.