The Song of Achilles Literary Elements

Historical Fiction

Ancient Greece and Anatolia, particularly Phthia, Mount Pelion, and Troy.

The book is narrated from the first-person point of view of Patroclus, best friend and lover of Achilles.

The tone is lyrical and introspective; the mood swings between romantic, ominous, and idyllic reminiscence.

Patroclus is the protagonist; his primary antagonists are fate and Thetis, Achilles' immortal mother. The story follows Greeks as protagonists and Trojans as antagonists in general.

The major conflict of the novel is that Patroclus and Achilles are trying to escape, or at least put off, Achilles' fated death during the Trojan war.

The novel reaches its climax when Patroclus dresses in Achilles' armor and goes into battle as him, pushing the Trojans back from the Greek camp. During the battle, he is killed by Hector, inciting the events that will bring an end to the 10-year war.

Multiple prophecies foreshadow the events of the novel, including Achilles dying young and famous, Achilles dying after Hector, and "the best of the Myrmidons" dying before Hector.

While the novel rarely employs understatement, when he describes the end of the Trojan war, Patroclus vastly understates the importance of the Trojan horse, perhaps out of uninterest: "Troy falls. [Neoptolemus] does not do it alone, of course. There is the horse, and Odysseus's plan, and a whole army besides. But he is the one who kills Priam." Patroclus understates the logistics of ending the war to focus on the personalities that accomplish it, as well as those they kill.

The novel makes allusions to other Greek works and myths, including Heracles and Megara, Orpheus and Eurydice, Jason, Perseus, Charybdis, the Labyrinth, and furies.

Miller frequently uses imagery evocative of Homeric epithets, as well as lyric poetry (some examples: "egg-shell thin"; "there was bright pleasure in his eyes"; "singing limbs"; "damp and curled as a flower at dawn").

While Achilles wants to be the first happy hero, he can only be a hero if he dies young.

When Patroclus lies awake dreading Achilles' fated death, his depiction of his thoughts uses parallelism for emphasis: "I think: This is what I will miss. I think: I will kill myself rather than miss it. I think: How long do we have?"

After Achilles kills Hector, synecdoche is used to demonstrate his progressive detachment from this life. When he fights Penthesilea, Achilles as a whole is represented by "a face," and at other times by shoulders or a spear, progressively dehumanizing him.

"The green oak leaves crowded around his hair." Oak leaves can't crowd; this personification evokes how Achilles will one day be crowded by men, as he becomes the legendary "greatest of the Greeks."