Figures of speech, sometimes called tropes (a Greek word meaning “turn”), are everywhere in literature. They are patterns made of words that turn meaning in some way.
The ancient Greeks, who were fond of taking one another to court and suing each other, recognized how powerful speech could be at winning arguments if one knew how to use figures. They identified these figures of speech and gave each one a name. We probably know many figures already; they have generally kept their Greek names: metaphor, simile, irony, and analogy are all examples. The Greeks developed a large catalog of figures, and the study of them was called rhetoric. It is very helpful to know at least some of the figures in order to be able to name them when you see them in a work of literature.
Some figures have more to do with sound (e.g. alliteration, onomatopoeia, anaphora). Others have more to do with sense (e.g. metaphor, irony, paradox). Some work at the level of the line or sentence (e.g. alliteration, pun, zeugma). Some may extend through an entire paragraph or whole work (e.g. analogy, irony, satire). All figures affect meaning.
There are many hundreds of figures. Below are some to study and remember, grouped by their characteristics: Figures of Substitution, Figures of Irony, Figures of Sound and Repetition, Figures of Syntax and Grammar, and Figures of Omission.
Explore any of the figures below, or move on to learn about Diction.
Figures of Substitution
Metaphor
Metaphor understands one thing through another, unlike thing by implicit comparison.
“All the world’s a stage/And all the men and women merely players.” —William Shakespeare.
Simile
Simile understands one thing through another, unlike thing, as with metaphor; however, the comparison is made explicit, generally using the words “like” or “as.”
“Oh, my love is like a red, red rose/That’s newly sprung in June” —Robert Burns.
Synecdoche
Synecdoche substitutes a part for the whole.
All hands on deck.
Personification
Personification gives an animal or object human characteristics.
A famished fox saw some clusters of ripe black grapes hanging from a trellised vine. She resorted to all her tricks to get at them, but wearied herself in vain, for she could not reach them. At last she turned away, hiding her disappointment and saying: “The Grapes are sour, and not ripe as I thought.” —Aesop
Allusion
Allusion makes an indirect reference to a literary or historical person, place, or thing outside the text.
No Blossom stayed away/In gentle deference to me— The Queen of Calvary —Emily Dickinson
Metonymy
Metonymy renames something using a closely associated thing or attribute.
The White House delivered a statement this afternoon.
Analogy
Analogy explicitly compares two things in order to explain or clarify, i.e. an extended simile.
Conducting diplomacy with a communist government is like negotiating with a large insurance company. You may be sent to different offices, and it will become difficult to determine who ultimately makes the decisions.
Symbol
A symbol is a token or sign that stands for or suggests something else. The symbol is a real object, sound, or even gesture.
The sea in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening symbolizes the vast, unconscious desires of her protagonist. Some symbols take on a formal cultural significance, such as a nation’s flag.
Allegory
Allegory occurs when most or all of the characters, objects, or actions of a story work togehter as symbols to express a unified idea.
For poet Billy Collins, an allegorical figure is “a thought in a coat.”
Fable
A fable tells a story involving a talking animal or, rarely, another form of personification. The use of personification enables the story to make some moral point.
Aesop’s “The Fox and the Grapes” is a famous ancient fable, George Orwell’s Animal Farm a modern one.
Hyperbole
Hyperbole exaggerates to an extreme.
The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as best I could, but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge. —Edgar Poe
Figures of Irony
Irony
Irony understands one thing by distancing itself from another, unlike thing by implicit contrast. Where figures such as metaphor substitute one thing for another to produce a positive comparison, ironic figures distance one thing from another to produce a negative contrast.
Verbal Irony
Verbal irony (called antiphrasis by the ancient Greeks): states something different or even the opposite of what is meant, usually relying on a sarcastic tone to convey the intended, opposite message.
A driver crashes his car into a ditch, and his passenger turns and says, “I hope you’re proud of yourself.”
Pun
A pun repeats a word in two different senses, or uses a nearly identical-sounding word in another sense for the sake of humor.
“Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana,” Anthony Oettinger.
Paradox
Paradox states a contradiction that may be true.
“Now that he had recognized himself as a dead man it became important to stay alive as long as possible,” George Orwell.
Antithesis
Antithesis introduces strongly contrasting or opposing ideas together to heighten their contrast.
“We are unknown, we knowers, ourselves to ourselves,” Friedrich Nietzsche.
Farce
Farce is a type of satire. It is a drama using highly exaggerated or absurd irony and often physical comedy to ridicule current events.
The Simpsons, Seinfeld, or Family Guy.
Dramatic Irony
Dramatic irony occurs when the audience knows more than a character, whose words or actions then take on a meaning the character does not understand.
In Sophocles’ play, Oedipus says, “If someone knows the killer is a stranger,/from some other state, let him not stay mute.” But the audience knows the killer is Oedipus, who does not know he himself was born in another state. He is unwittingly chasing himself.
Situational Irony
Situational irony arises when an expectation diverges from the reality of a situation.
George Orwell’s protagonist in 1984 holds a job rewriting history—changing newspaper articles, books, photos, etc.—in order to alter facts according to what the government wants them to be. He works for the office called “The Ministry of Truth.”
Oxymoron
Oxymoron places contradictory terms side-by-side.
Bittersweet; jumbo shrimp; cancel culture
Satire
Satire uses humorous irony to mock a person, idea, political view, or social practice thought immoral by the satirist. A whole work may be a satire, or it may contain satirical elements.
Jonathan Swift wrote “A Modest Proposal” to ridicule the English Parliament’s agricultural policy that was literally starving Ireland. He dryly proposes the government adopt a policy of eating the Irish.
Figures of Sound and Repetition
Alliteration
Alliteration repeats the initial sound in words.
He who laughs last laughs loudest.
Consonance
Consonance repeats consonant sounds.
The t sound in James Dickey’s phrase, “Through stratum after stratum of a tone.”
Anaphora
Anaphora repeats a word or phrase at the beginning of successive lines or clauses. Compare with Epistrophe.
“She is in her place and moves with perfect balance,/She is all things duly veil’d, she is both passive and active,” Walt Whitman.
Symploce
Symploce combines anaphora with epistrophe.
“O, I say these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul,/O I say now these are the soul!” Walt Whitman.
Onomatopoeia
Onomatopoeia imitates sounds using words.
“Mrkgnao! the cat cried,” James Joyce
Assonance
Assonance repeats vowel sounds.
The o sound in Robert Creeley’s phrase, “on the four corners of the world.”
Epistrophe
Epistrophe repeats a word or phrase at the end of successive lines or clauses. Compare with Anaphora.
“There was never any more inception than there is now,/Nor any more youth or age than there is now,/And will never be any more perfection than there is now,/Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now,” Walt Whitman.
Motif
Motif repeats a significant symbol, image, word, or incident throughout a work, weaving a pattern into it as a recurring pattern in a rug or on wallpaper.
Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man presents several motifs throughout, including: symbolic dolls or marionettes (representing manipulation), images of electricity (representing power), and incidents of blindness or obstructed vision (representing knowledge or a lack thereof).
Figures of Syntax and Grammar
Chiasmus
Chiasmus swaps the order of two words or phrases in successive lines or clauses.
“Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,” John F. Kennedy.
Are you working hard or hardly working?
Asyndeton
Asyndeton omits conjunctions between clauses or phrases. The opposite of Polysyndeton.
Barack Obama said he was on “a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring, and more prosperous America.”
Zeugma
Zeugma joins together subsequent phrases or clauses with one word, usually the verb.
I waved my flag, my hand, and my goodbye.
The ball, an insult, and the game were thrown.
Apposition
Apposition places a modifying phrase or phrases after a noun and a comma. As with parenthesis, a remarkable quality of appositives lies in their ability to extend indefinitely.
I wore my old sport coat, gray, patched, besmirched by college bacchanals, past the use of hiring meetings, less impressive to dates, more amenable to moths, loyal, comfortable.
Litotes
Litotes denies an opposite to achieve an intense, ironic understatement.
His economic adviser is not exactly a genius.
Polysyndeton
Polysyndeton uses many conjunctions between clauses or phrases. The opposite of Asyndeton.
“They were running on the plain harrying the antelope and the antelope moved like phantoms in the snow and circled and wheeled and the dry powder blew about them in the cold moonlight and their breath smoked palely in the cold as if they burned with some inner fire and the wolves twisted and turned and leapt in a silence such that they seemed of another world entire.” Cormac McCarthy.
Anastrophe
Anastrophe changes the usual syntax.
“When 900 years old you reach, look as good you will not,” Yoda.
Parenthesis
Parenthesis inserts an aside, usually with commas, parentheses, dashes, or brackets. Similar to apposition, parenthesis has a remarkable ability to extend indefinitely. Great authors may use figures of syntax and grammar to control sentence length and, consequently, evoke a particular feeling from the reader.
Nathaniel Hawthorne uses parenthesis to open chapter 36 of his novel The Marble Faun with an extraordinarily long, single sentence. Note how his use of the figure, along with Anaphora (“left her”), makes the grammar and syntax itself evoke the grand, complex history of the Eternal City:
“WHEN we have once known Rome, and left her where she lies, like a long-decaying corpse, retaining a trace of the noble shape it was, but with accumulated dust and a fungous growth overspreading all its more admirable features—left her in utter weariness, no doubt, of her narrow, crooked, intricate streets, so uncomfortably paved with little squares of lava that to tread over them is a penitential pilgrimage, so indescribably ugly, moreover, so cold, so alley-like, into which the sun never falls, and where a chill wind forces its deadly breath into our lungs—left her, tired of the sight of those immense seven-storied, yellow-washed hovels, or call them palaces, where all that is dreary in domestic life seems magnified and multiplied, and weary of climbing those staircases, which ascend from a ground floor of cookshops, cobblers’ stalls, stables, and regiments of cavalry, to a middle region of princes, cardinals, and ambassadors, and an upper tier of artists, just beneath the unattainable sky—left her, worn out with shivering at the cheerless and smoky fireside by day, and feasting with our own substance the ravenous little populace of a Roman bed at night—left her, sick at heart of Italian trickery, which has uprooted whatever faith in man’s integrity had endured till now, and sick at stomach of sour bread, sour wine, rancid butter, and bad cookery, needlessly bestowed on evil meats—left her, disgusted with the pretense of holiness and the reality of nastiness, each equally omnipresent—left her, half lifeless from the languid atmosphere, the vital principle of which has been used up long ago, or corrupted by myriads of slaughters—left her, crushed down in spirit with the desolation of her ruin, and the hopelessness of her future—left her, in short, hating her with all our might, and adding our individual curse to the infinite anathema which her old crimes have unmistakably brought down—when we have left Rome in such mood as this, we are astonished by the discovery, by and by, that our heartstrings have mysteriously attached themselves to the Eternal City, and are drawing us thitherward again, as if it were more familiar, more intimately our home, than even the spot where we were born.”
Figures of Omission
Paralipomenon
Paralipomenon omits a crucial scene or line. The reader must then imagine what happened.
In Melville’s Billy Budd, Billy emerges from the captain’s cabin ready to face his execution, saying “God bless Captain Veers!” What did the captain say to convince Billy his own execution was necessary? Why does Billy sound grateful? We do not know.
Apostrophe
Apostrophe addresses someone or something that is not present.
Frederick Douglass pours out his anguish to sailboats moving far over the horizon, “You are loosed from your moorings, and are free; I am fast in my chains, and am a slave!”
Foreshadowing
Foreshadowing presents a symbol, image, word, or incident early in a work to help the reader anticipate what is to come. It omits the context, however, with which the reader will later fully inderstand its meaning, thus developing suspense. (Repeating the foreshadowing symbol, image, word, or incident may make it into a motif.)
The title of Toni Morrison’s novel Song of Solomon, for example, foreshadows the climax of the novel, when Milkman will discover his great-grandfather Solomon’s song.
