Literary Devices In At First Sight By Nicholas Sparks

Bianca Lynch
Literary device essay

In the novel At First Sight by Nicholas Sparks He uses mood to help you understand the main character, this also helps you to empathize with his problems and correlate to how they may feel. Another literary device he uses to help you connect to the novel is imagery; he paints an elaborated picture of the town Jeremy Marsh now lives in with his new wife Lexi. The Author describes Boone Creek, a small town in NC Jeremy Marsh has recently moved to for his fiancé Lexi Darnell, as a small country hick town that anyone coming from NYC would be ashamed to call home. As Jeremy starts to feel more at home, His perspective of the town is changed. It changes from being a hick town to somewhere refreshing where
he could see himself settling down with Lexi and their Daughter to come he expresses this early on in ch. Four of the novel, “The last month in Boone creek, boring as it had been, was actually…refreshing” (Jeremy pg 52). In fact he gets so used to the town that when he went back home to NY for his bachelor party he felt out of place, as if something just didn’t fit. His brothers and best friend Alvin criticized his clothes, the “lumberjack” shirt Lexi bought him. Although Jeremy always did consider himself a somewhat “stylish” man and if he was still living in NY would have never been seen in those clothes by wearing it made him feel somehow connected to Lexi and his new home Boone Creek. As I read this novel I pictured a clean cut New Yorker moving so a small country town and becoming lost in all the small town gossip and unfamiliar country ways.” They’ll talk behind our backs, they’ll gossip, and it’ll take folks along time to forget that we ‘lived in sin’” (Lexi pg. 44) Lexi told Jeremy when trying to explain to him why they couldn’t live together before getting married. What Jeremy could not become accustomed to was the constant gossip about other people’s lives, although this did go on in the city it wasn’t as bad because new Yorkers don’t have enough time in the day to just sit around and talk about other people’s lives. Another literary device Nicholas Sparks used to absorb the readers attention is mood.
Throughout the whole first half of the novel I was left in suspense as to how Jeremy and Lexis relationship would turn out. In the first four chapters the author tries to get the reader to think that there may be some kind of unfaithfulness going on between Lexi and Jeremy on Lexi’s part. Jeremy goes to Lexis job early one day to surprise her and she wasn’t there and did not mention getting off early to him beforehand. When he went to look for her he found her on the bench that overlooked the river with Rodney, her childhood love,” until , that is they shifted on the bench, and he then realized they were holding hands.” (Jeremy pg. 73), this along with many other unexplained disappearances by Lexi leads to the suspense in the novel. As I read the end when lexi dies after labor it puts me in a doleful mood. With Jeremy mourning his wife’s death and the thought of their baby girl not having a mother in her life, he refuses to go see his daughter; in fact he said he never wanted to see her. Since Lexi died during Claries birth Jeremy feels animosity towards her, when asked if he saw her yet he said no. “Jeremy turned away. He didn’t want to heart that, didn’t want to hear anything about the baby…would he ever be happy again?”(Jeremy pg 258) Doris, Lexi’s grandmother finally convinces him to go see her, “And in that instance, while staring at his daughter through a thousand tears, he fell in love and wanted nothing more than to hold Claire forever.” (Narrator pg 263). Jeremy learns to accept Lexis death and accept the gift she left behind, Claire. Although the novel jumps from suspense to love to distressing times Nicholas Sparks still manages to consume the readers attention by using mood and
imajery.