Genre
fiction
Setting and Context
London, precise time not mentioned, towards the end of 20th century
Narrator and Point of View
Narrator: omniscient;
Point of view: third person
Tone and Mood
Tone: indirect;
Mood: gloomy
Protagonist and Antagonist
Protagonist: Stephen Lewis; Antagonist: unknown kidnappers of Stephen's daughter
Major Conflict
Stephen's daughter Kate gets kidnapped while they go on a casual grocery trip to the supermarket.
Climax
Stephen's wife Julie summons him via Thelma, to urgently visit her in her cottage. When he arrives there he finds her in labor.
Foreshadowing
"The vision of his parents' youth, their bicycles and them sitting in a bar together serves as a foreshadowing for Stephen. It foreshadows his fate coming at a full circle at the end when he goes the same path where he saw the bicycles to reunite with his wife.
Understatement
"The baby inside her was not yet an entity, not something to be defended at all costs."
-Chapter Seven
Stephen's mother recalls the moment of the vision Stephen had. She just found out that she was pregnant and when seeing the unfavourable reaction of his father, she was trying to convince herself, to understate the meaning, even importance of the pregnancy, until she had a vision of the baby, real, with hopes and dreams of life.
Allusions
"On the walls, instead of framed black and white photographs of the early twentieth-century giants who had made great the name of Gott, was a portrait not of Evelyn Waugh, surely, but a frog in a three-piece suit leaning on a cane by the balustrade of a country house."
-Chapter Two
Imagery
The imagery of dreadful silence that is followed up with Stephen's final realization that his daughter is gone makes for an impactful scene.
Paradox
"He was the father of an invisible child."
-Chapter One
Parallelism
"He was not mad, he knew what was real. He knew what he was doing, he knew she was gone."
-Chapter Six
Metonymy and Synecdoche
"There were other members of the supermarket hierarchy in brown coats, white coats, blue suits, who suddenly were no longer ware-housemen or sub-managers or company representatives, but fathers, potential or real."
-Chapter One
Personification
"The wood had detonated, it was engulfed in such a chaos of vegetation it was in danger of choking on abundance."
-Chapter Five
