The Rape of Nanking Literary Elements

Non-fiction

The events take place during the second Sino-Japanese war, in Nanking, the Republic of China. The city fell on 13, 1937 and then followed the massacre which lasted 8 weeks and took away lives of 350, 000 people.

The type of narration changes through the course of the story. When the author writes about her family, she writes from the first point of view. When she uses recollections of other people, who witnessed the massacre, she writes from the third point of view.

The tone of the story is serious and concerned, while the mood of story is desperate and frightful, for this books tells about suffering of hundreds of thousands of innocent people.

The protagonist of this story is citizens of Nanking. The antagonist is the Japanese army.

It is a military conflict between Japan and China.

Fall of Nanking

The title of the story, “The Rape of Nanking”, foreshadows the events described in it.

Attitude of the Japanese soldiers to Chinese people is understatement. They didn’t consider them to be human being and as a consequence of this attitude they killed mercifully hundreds of thousands of people.

This book is a non-fiction story dedicated to one of the biggest tragedies of Warld War II, which is why it is full of allusions. The author mentions such names as Horace, Matthew Perry, The Tokugawa, Hasimoto Kingoro, Matsui Iwane, Prince Asaka, General Yanagawa, Chiang Kai-shen, Tang Sheng-chin, Hitler, John Rabe, Robert Wilson and Minnie Vautrin. She also mentions such historical events as World War I and Sino-Japan wars.

Imagery is used to describe horrors of the massacre. The author uses diaries of witnesses who kept them during the massacre.

Laws of war are an example of paradox. The second war between Japan and Chine had no laws. Regardless of all international laws, the civilians were tortured and killed in the cruelest ways. Even children couldn’t escape a dreadful fate which awaited them.

The streets jammed with cars, horses, and refugees – the young and the old, the weak and the strong, the rich and the poor.
Parallelism helps to describe panic among citizens of Nanking, who wanted to leave the city as soon as possible.

To feed 60 million mouths.
Mouths are an example of metonymy, which denotes people.
White-collar and blue –collar
These phrases are examples of synecdoche, which denotes administrators and a working class.

Japan had spent decades training its men.
This is an example of personification. It is not Japan, it’s the government of Japan led the policy of militarization of the society.