What Storm, What Thunder Literary Elements

Fiction

In Haiti, both before and after the devastating earthquake in 2010

The novel has a multivoiced narrator, with the narrator switching with each chapter. Each narrator speaks from a first-person point of view.

The tone of the book is raw, fierce, and intimate. The mood is haunting and tragic.

The survivors of the earthquake are the protagonists of the book; the earthquake itself is the antagonist of the book.

The survivors' struggle to reconcile their grief and trauma after the earthquake tears their lives apart.

There is no significant climax in the novel, as it frequently jumps back and forth between time before the earthquake and after. However, the waterfall experience serves as a type of healing agent for many of the women; after this experience, they are able to begin to move on and rebuild.

Sonia and Dieudonné feel a sense of unease and foreboding that anticipates the earthquake. They even see a man they call the god of death.

Many of the verbal ironies in the novel are also understatement, as certain characters satirize the notion of foreign aid and "American benefactors" to emphasize how ineffective these efforts are.

In Didier's chapter there are frequent allusions to the Bible, specifically the section in Revelations that describes the end of the world.

Chancy uses imagery frequently to describe the earthquake, painting graphic and vivid pictures of the destruction. Other important imagery includes the marketplace, a threatening snake eye, Carnival, and the church containing a limp statue of Jesus.

The central paradox of the novel is also its most devastating political statement. Chancy encourages the reader to question how, after so much loss and suffering, the people of Haiti could be forced to suffer even more in the aftermath of such a tragedy due to insufficient aid and a lack of international support.

Taffia and Paul are parallel characters in that the author traces how each responds to their experiences with sexual assault: Taffia, a woman, has no choice but to bear the burden of the violence that was lodged against her, and she ends up birthing a baby as a result of her rape. Paul, by contrast, becomes so ashamed of his own experience that he acts out, joining the bands of violent men who wreak havoc on those in the camps.

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Death is personified when Anne describes how "death came, slowly, steadily, on icy tiptoe."