egins in the town of Sighet in Transylvania (modern-day Romania), in the 1930s. As the book progresses it goes into the concentration camps in Poland in WWII and ends with the liberation of Buchenwald in 1945. 22) A simile is using the words "like" or "as" to compare two separate objects. A simile shows the reader a comparison and gives the reader a better sense of the object being described. Example: In the first book of Virgil's Aeneid, Aeneas compares Tyrian workers in Carthage to bees. "Just as their work wearies bees in the sunlight/ of young summer on blossoming farms where the old ones/ lead out the hive's young or pack syrupy honey/ in cells, filling the hives with nectar-like sweetness:/ they either take on loads from arrivals or form up/ ranks to keep the lazy group of drones from storage:/ the work teems amid fragrant, thyme-scented honey." Since two different things are being compared using the word "as", the passage is a simile. 23) Subtlety is a quality of being hard to understand. Something that is subtle is hard to detect; it is not obvious. Example: In The Unvanquished, Drusilla is subtle when she speaks with anger, cynicism, and bitterness within for the loss of her husband-to-be. Although she does not lose control in the novel, she subtly reproaches the war-blaming it for the loss of her pre-programmed life. 24) A symbol depicts an image that has more than a simple literal meaning to a literary work. It describes something that is important in the novel. Examples: Underground movements in Night and the pearl in The Pearl are symbols of the hope that there is a better life ahead for the characters in the books. Going forward against what is told for them to do, the characters in the novels expect to better their lives by not following orders and what is "preset" for them by the setting they are in. 25) Syntax is a demonstration of how the author of a literary work strings words together. Example: "Somebody slipped into...
