42 pages • 1 hour read
Khaled HosseiniSea Prayer
Fiction | Graphic Novel/Book | Adult | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Point of View
Point of view refers to the perspective through which the story is told. This text is narrated by Marwan’s father, who is unnamed. Although a large part of the story references events that both Marwan and his father were present for, it is the father’s memory that is relied upon. Since they hear these events through this particular narrator, the reader is prompted to join him in focusing his attention on Marwan instead of other subjects. Here, the point of view perpetuates the Loss of Identity that everyone but Marwan experiences. Because the narrator’s focus is his family, the story does not include events that other people went through and instead focuses so tightly on the experiences he wants Marwan to remember that other details, like dates or names, are ignored.
Not only does the perspective of Marwan’s father affects the focus on Marwan as “the most precious [cargo] there ever was” (43), but this narrator is also limited in time. His perspective is limited to the information he knows while awaiting sunrise on the beach. He cannot know the result of the journey or what awaits them should they reach their destination. This perspective in time emphasizes the Failures of Memory as he tries to collect details of their life before the conflict started despite Marwan’s inability to remember them for himself. By framing this letter from this point of time, Hosseini raises tension surrounding the risks that Marwan’s family are taking by embarking on this dangerous bid for freedom.
Free Verse
Free verse is a form of poetry that does not adhere to specific requirements like rhyme schemes or meter. Often resembling typical speech, free verse like that in Sea Prayer uses the flexible format to emphasize specific moments. In this case, Sea Prayer uses the narrator’s voice in the guise of a normal letter but isolates certain words through line breaks and page breaks.
Hosseini repeatedly uses lists of details spaced out poetically to add gravitas to everyday objects and sights. He breaks apart the sentence, “[y]ou wouldn’t have forgotten the farmhouse, / the soot of its stone walls, / the creek where your uncles and I built / a thousand boyhood dams” (13). Rather than ending each line with a rhyme or predetermined pattern, the author is free to emphasize the important images of the farmhouse (“farmhouse, / […] walls, / […] built, / […] dams”) that Marwan can no longer remember and allows the rhythm to change in each line.
Personification
Personification is a literary device whereby a nonhuman entity is depicted with human characteristics. Sea Prayer uses human descriptions to narrate non-human subjects. Large subjects like the sky and the sea are personified into impulsive and tactile subjects by using human words to describe them. Bombs do not simply fall from the sky, but the sky actively spits them out (23). In the same way, the sea is described as a single entity capable of understanding. The boat that Marwan and his father will take out onto the sea is vulnerable, and the sea can know this. The danger that the narrator ascribes to the journey is not of drowning in water but being “easily swallowed” by the sea (43). Personification allows Hosseini to make poetic choices free from the literal way that inanimate objects behave. This elevates the narrator’s plight because the text shows him trying to reason with the sea even though the sea cannot literally understand him. The personification also reinforces the ironically child-friendly elements of the text, since it simplifies dangerous elements into more understandable figures for the narrator’s young son and draws attention to the father’s real vulnerability to these large forces.
Anaphora
Anaphora occurs when the same word or phrase is repeated at the beginning of a series of sentences or phrases. This repetition creates a rhythm in the text and draws attention to the small changes that are made. In Sea Prayer, the narrator repeats the beginning phrase “[a]ll of us” for three consecutive lines: “All of us impatient for sunrise, / all of us in dread of it. / All of us in search of home” (33) This results in a greater contrast between the latter half of the phrases, especially when they are contradictory—for example, being impatient for something you are equally dreading. Not only does anaphora allow certain ideas to stand out, it also affects the speed at which the reader receives information. By including the same phrase at the beginning of each line, the text creates a steady rhythm and emphasizes the phrase’s importance with each repetition.
Related Titles
By Khaled Hosseini
