Literary Devices In Olive Kitteridge

The perceptive quality of Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Olive Kitteridge, focuses on the ordinary, the regular, and quotidian aspects of life; growing old, the fluctuations of a marriage, the anxious growth of children, and life’s everyday trivialities and little feelings that swell throughout an individual lifespan. Strout achieves this empathetic sense by using long detailed and descriptive sentences, a healthy mix of cumulative and periodic which explore and bluntly state solid truths about the people of the setting. This mix of sentence structure and style parallels the nuance of the characters and the development of emotional power within the book. The narrator is an omnipresent being who hangs above the setting, the …show more content…
Strout’s narrator tends to delve into a particularly sad detail or character feature and then punctuate it with an offhand comment taken directly from the character’s own head of strange and transient afterthoughts. Sometimes the side comments are even the narrator’s own, but never do they feel out of place and are very sparse. In this way, the narrator is a gossiping but indelibly empathetic member of the Maine town itself. The narration is also pretty informal, helping embody this idea fully. An example from a chapter, “The Piano Player” is indicative: “And so he—after how many years—had thought, or not thought, of her, but for some reason had driven to Crosby, Main. Had he known she would be working here?” (Strout 56). The narrator’s informality is a key feature that makes these stories work as it inserts its elucidating comments here and there, interrupting the narrative for a small digress using dashes, colons, semicolons and sometimes ellipses or taking the voice of the character entirely to state an important thought. It is a satisfying technique that is used throughout the book quite often and has the quality of a privy tell-all narrator who is friends with all of these characters and invites the reader in to meet them and learn the most intimate …show more content…
Olive Kitteridge is the focus and the title of the book because she maintains a universal complexity that affects every single character she comes into contact with—in this, she is a harsh and blunt personification of universal discomfort. It is why everyone has such strong reactions to her, good or bad. The quotidian life is worthy of meticulous inspection, exploration, respect, and empathy. Strout uses various writing styles and techniques to embody those feelings, gain the reader’s interest by making them complex beings trying their best in an uncertain world that is changing around them. Perceptive detail and a playful tone of seriousness from a deeply-involved narrator helps string together a cohesive understanding of the people who inhabit Crosby, Maine doing nothing other than living ordinary lives. Strout’s novel proves that the ordinary is worth our attention