Can we love our battering fathers?, Helen H. Gordon

Student`s Name: Instructor`s Name: School Name: Course Code: Date Due: How the literary devices of emphasis create haunting despair in "Can we love our battering fathers" by Helen H. Gordon Literary devices are useful as a means of emphasizing the truth. Authors usually use literal or explicit meanings to stress on the importance of a fact. These devices are an important part of literature as they aim to create a better understanding of a subject in a piece of literature. In the essay "Can we love our battering fathers", Helen H. Gordon, the author, makes use of literary devices such as rhetorical questions, allusion, juxtaposition, and parallelism to emphasize on the haunting despair in the family. The author creates an image that shows hopelessness and despair as the father behaves violently towards the mother and his children. Misery dominates the whole family due to torture the wife and daughter pass through regularly. This creates a sense of uncertainty in the family. LITERARY DEVICES Gordon uses rhetorical questions to show the importance of the despair the battering husband and father creates in his family. Rhetorical questions are meant to achieve emphasis that is stronger than that of a direct quote. The violent father creates despair between the family causing the mother and children to flee from him. This breaks the family apart. The father`s violent and short tempered behaviour is shown through a rhetorical question when he breaks his wife`s favourite vase. He blames his action on his wife knowing full well that it was his own fault "What the hell d`ja put that thing there for?" (Gordon, 47). Of course, he did not expect his wife to answer the question since he already knew the answer. This question emphasizes the family`s haunting despair as the father is shown to have no regrets towards his violent actions. This anger spills over to his family leaving them no choice, but, to escape. This question can also be a form of irony ...