The Killer Angels Literary Elements

Historic novel

The action takes place in Gettysburg and spans the duration of four days in June and July 1863.

The action in the novel is told from the perspective of a first-person subjective point of view.

The tone and mood in the novel are violent and depressing.

The protagonists are the Union soldiers and the antagonist is the Confederated army.

The major conflict is a political one and is between the Union and the Confederacy.

The novel reaches its climax when the Union army wins the war.

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At the beginning of the novel, war is described as being a noble and fulfilling action and something in which everyone should wish to be a part of. This is later proven to be an understatement when the narrator describes what it really means to be a soldier fighting on a battlefield.

One of the main allusions in the novel is the idea that the Union army already won the battle before it even started.

One of the most important imagery in the novel is that of the dead soldier on the battlefield. This image impacts the other soldiers as well and makes them realize just how violent and unforgiving war can be.

One of the main paradoxes in the novel is the way in which many soldiers fight for one side or the other even though they do not necessarily believe in what their particular side was trying to protect.

Parallelism is drawn between the soldiers fighting for the Union and those fighting for the Confederacy on numerous occasions in the novel. This parallel has the purpose of transmitting the idea that there was not a big difference between the soldiers and that they should not be held accountable for their actions since they were simply following orders.

The hill which the two armies try to gain control of is used here as a general term to make reference to political superiority. Thus, the hill is in the novel a metonymy.

We have a personification in the line "the blood of the soldiers was swallowed by the thirsty earth".