The Black Death: A Personal History Literary Elements

Historical docudrama

The action takes place in England, in the town of Walsham during the bubonic plague in the 14th century.

The action is told from the perspective of a third-person objective point of view.

The tone and mood used in the story are a tense one.

The protagonists are the inhabitants of Walsham and the antagonist is the black death or the bubonic plague.

The major conflict in the story is an internal one and is between the desire to put one's faith in God and the tendency to blame him for all the pain and suffering caused by the bubonic plague.

The story reaches its climax when the first case of black death is discovered in Walsham.

In the prologue of the story, the priest is cited as claiming that nothing can stop the black death. This foreshadows the later description of how the black death affected the city of Walsham.

At the beginning of the novel, the mayor of the town and the priest claim that only those who are not learned fear the plague. This is soon proven to be an understatement when everyone in the city, regardless of their education, is gripped by fear and desperation.

The main allusion we find in the story is the idea that the black plague was a punishment caused by God.

The origin of the black death is pinpointed in the book as being the faraway lands of Turkey and the Middle East, an area inhabited by Muslims and other religious groups. The plague is portrayed throughout the book as a divine punishment and by associating it with non-Christian people, the narrator portrays them as domed and as having corrupt souls.

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The narrator draws many parallels between the efforts put by the people of Walsham to protect their city from the plague and the efforts put forth by other cities and villages. The parallels are used here to transmit the idea that no matter what humans do, the plague cannot be stopped and that everyone will be eventually affected by it in some way or another.

The library is used here as a general term to make reference to the idea of knowledge.

We have a personification at the beginning of the book in the sentence "in all this time, the pestilence did not cease its movement but moved rapidly towards our land".