I Hotel Literary Elements

Fiction

The setting is in America at the time when activism was taking root after the murder of Martin Luther King Jr.

The narrator is in the third person. The point of view of the narrator is that war and inequality should be squashed in society.

The tone is critical and the mood is melancholy. This is because the subject matter of the novel is human suffering through inequality and war.

The protagonists are the activists like Paul, Chen and other university students that protest inequality in the society whereas the antagonists are those that enforce the inequalities that already exist in the society.

The major conflict is the growth of Paul. He was especially devastated after the death of his father. The conflict is the purpose that Paul has in his life.

The climax is reached when Paul chooses activism in school to fight against inequalities in the society that he lives in.

There is a foreshadowing after the death of Paul's father that Paul would take after him. Paul does this when he becomes an activist along a friend of his father, Chen.

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Literary allusion to the poem of Dylan Thomas, 'Do not go gentle into that good night' when Paul's father died. The narrator remarked that Paul's father had gone, '...quietly into that good night.'

The description of Paul's attire during his father's funeral. His attire is described as, 'Paul wears a black suit, a black waistband and a black band on his left arm.' The description creates imagery because the narrator has used the adjective 'black' to describe the color of the clothes that Paul was wearing.

The following statement is paradoxical, 'To save lives and to win the city, we shell and bomb the sacred history of Hue back to the Stone Age. Six thousand residents die in the rubble and one hundred and twenty thousand wander homeless.' The statement is paradoxical because the claim is that to save lives of a particular group of people, others must be killed and their cities ruined.

A parallel is drawn between Paul's family that consisted of only him and his father and that of his aunt that had many children. When Paul's father died, he was all alone.

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Chen personified the brains of Paul's parents when he said that they met with their brains. The brains have been given the ability to move and meet up.