Genre
Science Fiction
Setting and Context
Set in 1960s Wisconsin
Narrator and Point of View
Third-person narration from the perspective of an omniscient speaker.
Tone and Mood
Suspenseful, Mysterious Lonely, Emotional
Protagonist and Antagonist
Protagonist: Enoch Wallace; Antagonist: War
Major Conflict
Enoch is a war veteran who has lived for over 100 years but still looks like a young man in his 30s. This piques the interest of the government since unbeknownst to them Enoch has been harboring the travels and secrets of an alien civilization.
Climax
The climax occurs when Enoch is protecting Alice while Lewis is retrieving the body that Enoch buried.
Foreshadowing
“But silence was an alien note that held no right upon this field or day”
The statement foreshadows the first encounter the protagonist has with the alien species.
Understatement
N/A
Allusions
“I have heard some say that each of them is another sun like the sun that shines on Earth, but I don't know about that. I guess there is no one who knows too much about them… if the stars are other suns, might there not be other planets and other people, too.”
Imagery
“The smoke drifted like thin, gray wisps of fog above the tortured earth and the shattered fences and the peach trees that had been whittled into toothpicks by the cannon fire. For a moment silence, if not peace, fell upon those few square miles of ground where just a while before men had screamed and torn at one another in the frenzy of old hate and had contended in an ancient striving and then had fallen apart, exhausted.”
Paradox
There is a paradox when Enoch has to choose where his loyalty lies since siding with either Earth or the galactic organization will have its consequences.
Parallelism
“The ache was there, the ache that had been growing, the ache to tell all mankind those things that he had learned. Not so much the specific things, although there were some of them that mankind well could use, but the general things, the unspecific central fact that there was intelligence throughout the universe, that Man was not alone, that if he only found the way he need never be alone again.”
Metonymy and Synecdoche
“There were the daily papers”
Papers is synecdoche for print media.
Personification
“The wind had quit its blowing, if it had ever blown.”
