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Salvation Langston Hughes Rhetorical Devices

Decent Essays

Langston Hughes’s personal narrative “Salvation” is a recollection of Hughes’s experience with salvation at a religious revival at his aunt’s church. He recounts his experience in order to describe how it led to his enormous guilt over deceiving his aunt and the congregation and how it stemmed his disbelief in religion. His ironic tone and vivid imagery plays a key role in the development of the conflict and the complications that he faces. In order to dramatize suspenseful moments and magnify key points, he uses an array of rhetorical devices.
Immediately, Hughes directly states his thesis in the first two sentences of his introductory paragraph: “I was saved from sin when I was going on thirteen. But not really saved.” His thesis serves as an example of a paradoxical statement because he contradicts his claim that he “was saved from sin” with the assertion that he was “not really saved.” He inserts paradox in his thesis in an attempt to attract the reader’s attention by emphasizing his tone of irony. Additionally, his thesis provides both the limited topic and focusing idea of the essay. The limited topic of his essay is his intended salvation as a child while his focusing idea is the fact that his supposed salvation was not honest. His thesis foreshadows the irony of his narrative, and it establishes the main points that he will address.
Furthermore, Hughes uses the rhetorical device of allusion when he writes about his aunt’s bringing him to the church for a special meeting. When he writes, “Then just before the revival ended, they held a special meeting for children, ‘to bring the young lambs to the fold’’’ (1), he attempts to correlate his invitation to salvation to a Biblical parable. Along with his reference to the Bible, he conveys the church member’s excitement with vivid imagery. He illustrates the church’s setting as being infuse with “all moans and shouts and lonely cries and dire pictures of hell”, and he also describes the preacher’s sermon as a “wonderful rhythmical sermon” (3). Conjointly, Hughes presents imagery of the churchgoers and alludes to a Biblical story in order to demonstrate the magnitude of the religious enthusiasm of the members of the church.
Hughes does not limit his usage of

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