Another Country Literary Elements

Fiction

New York and Paris in the 1950s

The story is told from the third-person point of view by an omniscient narrator.

Tone: bemused, earnest, questioning, contemptuous, gloomy, paranoid, miserable

Mood: mellow, hopeful, nightmarish, depressed

Protagonist: Rufus, Vivaldo, Eric, Cass. Antagonist: Ellis.

How will Rufus's friends come to terms with his death?
Can Blacks and whites in America ever truly come to a place of mutual understanding?

Rufus's death, which happens early in the novel, can be considered the climax of the novel, as the rest of it concerns his friends' attempts to come to terms with why he died and what his death means to them.

1. Rufus remembering that one summer when he was a child a boy drowned in the Harlem River foreshadows his own death by jumping off the bridge and (presumably) drowning.

1. "His mother had been a waitress when the Germans came to Paris" (186) is an understatement for the Nazi occupation of Paris during WWII.

1. Rufus frequently calls Leona "Little Eva," a character from Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" (1852).
2. Rufus calls Vivaldo Sir Walter Raleigh when Vivaldo suggests he will take Leona a way; Raleigh was a 16th-century English explorer.
3. Vivaldo tells Rufus to knock off the "Gone with the Wind" nonsense, referencing the famous 1936 novel notorious for its positive depiction of antebellum slavery.
4. Cass calls a dripping wet Vivaldo "Heathcliff," the main character in Emily Bronte's Romantic "Wuthering Heights" (1847).
5. Cass says Richard's novel has been compared to "Crime and Punishment," one of Fyoder Dostoevsky's novels (1866).
6. Ellis asking Ida why Vivaldo insists on "hiding his light under a bushel" (258) is an allusion to a parable of Jesus found in the Gospels.
7. Belle and Vivaldo and Harold joke about Romeo and Juliet and Mercutio, characters from Shakespeare's play "Romeo and Juliet" (1597).

There is a great deal of images of falling, of edges and precipitous heights, which suggests how the characters feel like they are going to plummet to their literal or moral deaths. There are also images of crowds, such as in clubs and cafes and parks, that give a sense of claustrophobia.

1. "He wanted to hear her story. And he wanted to know nothing more about her" (22).
2. "Her face would now be, forever, more mysterious and impenetrable than the face of any stranger" (171-172).
3. "It was this violence which made him gentle" (225).

N/A

Maybe one of the guys would lay enough bread on him for a meal or at least subway fare. (Bread is metonymy and stands for money).

1. "A hotel's enormous neon sign challenged the starless sky" (4).
2. "The world, the air, went red and black, then roared in at him with faces and fists" (33).
3. "The piano bore the singer witness, stoic and ironic" (49).
4. "Tall apartments, lightless, loomed against the dark sky and seemed to be watching him, seemed to be pressing down on him" (87).
5. "...it was almost as though the jaws of her mind had closed on her" (125).
6. "And beneath all this was the void where anguish lived and questions crouched" (306).