The Most Dangerous Game

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Most Dangerous Game Literary Techniques In almost every story there is a theme that the writer tries to get across to the reader as he or she reads the story. By using literary techniques such as suspense, irony, foreshadowing and other techniques Connell explains that a person who has overconfidence if not careful slip into a downward spiral. In the short story “The Most Dangerous Game”, Connell uses these elements to help the reader discover the theme of his story, that everything, regardless if it is an animal or human, has emotions and feelings, such as the prey of a hunter experiencing fear, which Rainsford experiences first hand. “This world's divided into two kinds of people: the hunter and the hunted. Luckily I'm the hunter. Nothing can change that” Rainsford (9). I will discuss how Connell uses these literary techniques to emphasize the theme effectively on the story. In the exposition of “The Most Dangerous Game” the protagonist, Rainsford, is talking to his companion Whitney about how hunting is the best sport in the world, to which Whitney replies “not for the prey it isn’t” (10). Rainsford is baffled by this and states that all hunted animals can’t feel fear because they aren’t advanced enough. This part of the story is a great example of how Connell uses foreshadowing to put the idea of the theme in the readers head. As the reader thinks about what Rainsford and Whitney have said, the reader begins to think of whether or not the prey feels fear or not, which is what Connell would have wanted the reader to do because he wanted him or her to start thinking of the theme of “everything has emotions” and rainsford experiences this in his hunt versus general Zaroff. This is just one of the ways Connell uses literary elements to help the reader learn and understand the theme of his story; he also uses irony and suspense quite well which is what I will
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