Crome Yellow Literary Elements

Literary Fiction, Roman-à-clef

The Crome estate in the English countryside one summer during the 1920s

Third person point of view, omniscient narrator with an access to the characters’ thoughts and emotions.

The tone of the novel is sarcastic and satirical, while the mood varies between calm and peaceful on the one hand, oppressed and anxious on the other in connection with the main character’s feelings and thoughts.

Denis Stone is the protagonist of the book. There is no antagonist as he faces his inner conflicts instead of outer ones.

The main conflict in the story is summed in Denis’ inability to confront Anne and confess his love for her openly.

The story reaches its peak when the telegram reaches Denis, who perceives for the first time that Anne actually cares about him. Here the reader is all anticipation, wondering whether Denis would stay or leave after all.

The last sentence in chapter 19 foreshadows what happens in the following section of the book. It runs thus, “From below, in the house, came the wasp-like buzzing of an alarm-clock. He had gone back just in time.” Here, the passage describes the progress of Ivor from Mary’s tower to his own, just in time to avoid been seen by the other guests at Crome. At the same time, it foreshadows his departure from Crome just in time to cut his romance with Mary short. Ivor is depicted as a libertine in the story, and so as soon as his adventure with Mary had begun to take a serious turn, he decided to leave the house and the girl behind.

When Denis came to the aid of Anne after she had fallen in the dark, he asked her whether she was hurt and she answered “Not so bad” which is an understatement because in truth, she was in pain, and already exhibiting three abrasions with traces of “involuntary tears of pain lingering up at her face”.

The party assembled at Crome alludes to the members of the Bloomsbury Group with Denis Stone as Aldous Huxley himself, and Mr. Scogan arguably as Bertrand Russell.

“Denis pulled a sprig of lavender and sniffed at it; then some dark leaves of rosemary that smelt like incense in a cavernous church.” In this passage, visual and olfactory imagery are used to draw a vivid picture in the mind of the reader of the setting and its sensations.

In chapter 22, Mr. Scogan addresses Denis saying, “Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay.” This is a paradox, not only on the level of language, but as a literary device which covers the socio-historical circumstances of the era as well.

“But it’s gnomic, it’s gnomic” This sentence is made of components that are similar in construction, sound, meaning, and meter.

“Denis looked and listened while the witch prophesied financial losses, death by apoplexy, destruction by air-raids in the next war.”
Here ‘witch’ is a metonymy for Mr. Scogan who dressed as one for the Crome charity fair.

“A small English-German dictionary was all I had at hand”
The term ‘hand’ here is a synecdoche. It does not signify the organ alone, but rather indicates that Denis had only this one dictionary in his room at the time.

“He vanished through the trap door into the darkness that still lurked within the shuttered house.”
Here the darkness is given the aspects of a human being hiding and lurking inside the house.