Genre
Nonfiction
Setting and Context
Contemporary era
Narrator and Point of View
Richard Louv is the first-person narrator.
Tone and Mood
Advocacy, ecocritical, advisory, informative, cautionary, and alarming
Protagonist and Antagonist
Children are the protagonist. ‘Nature-deficit disorder’ is the antagonist.
Major Conflict
Rescuing children from the repercussions of ‘nature-deficit disorder.’
Climax
The reunification of nature and children.
Foreshadowing
N/A
Understatement
N/A
Allusions
Allusion to medicine.
Literary allusions such as Daniel Beard’s “Shelters, Shacks and Shanties.”
Imagery
Technology, urbanization, and contemporary lifestyles deny the children natural settings that would have enhanced their overall wellbeing.
Paradox
The paradoxical belief "Food is from Venus; farming is from Mars" underscores the young people's detachment from nature.
Parallelism
Each chapter commences with quotations attributed to credible personalities or quotations from poems.
Metonymy and Synecdoche
“In the woods” denotes danger.
Woods represent nature.
Personification
The subheading, “ Are we mice or are we men,” is a covert personification of mice intended to allude to the lapse of ‘biological absolutes.’
