The imagery allows the readers to create mental images from the words “Hell’s Gate,” which makes the audience wonder what is going to happen at this mysterious place.…
In the sermon, “Sinners In The Hands of An Angry God,” Jonathan Edwards utilizes imagery as one of the rhetorical devices in order to scare his audience back to the pious ways of the first generation Puritans. Edwards’ vivid descriptions of hell and eternal torment are examples of the emotional appeal pathos. He uses figurative language including metaphors, similes, and personification to illustrate this unfortunate scenario in the minds of his listeners. For example, Edwards’ states, “The devil is waiting for them, hell is gaping for them, the flames gather and flash about them, and would fain lay hold on them, and swallow them up…” (8-10). In this example the audience can clearly imagine the horrors of hell, which encourages them to look to God for salvation, thus also making use of logos as the audience rationalizes and considers the situation. Hell is described as a “world of misery, that lake of burning brimstone…” (19-10), among many other things. The speaker/writer’s depictions of hell work to keep the audience members on their toes so they remember what they are doomed for if they dare to stray further from the Church or anger God even more than they have already done so. The rich imagery in this sermon is significant to the uniqueness of the piece because Edwards’ uses this literary device to scare the audience into compliance, and it serves as a main support for the author’s overall purpose, which is to get people to solidify ties to the…
When is the last time that you saw a literary device? In a poem, or a novel? Perhaps a short story? Literary devices: we all use them, we all love them, but what can it really do for an author's writing? When used correctly they can add character and dimension to one's writing, but what some fail to remember is that even the best writers can fall extremely short to writing excellent literary elements. In the short story “The Most Dangerous Game,” Richard Connell uses literary devices such as personifications and allusions to help the reader better understand the plot and characters. Although Connell excelled in his numerous uses of personifications, his allusions he attempted were far from perfection.…
The significance of allusions in literature is further seen in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Kesey’s most apparent biblical allusion is seen within Bromden’s depiction of the Combine, he states, “... endless machines…swarming with sweating, shirtless men running up and down catwalks, blank faces and dreamy in firelight thrown from a hundred blast furnaces,” (Kesey 86). The gloomy atmosphere as well as the mechanical and brutal nature of the ward, is perhaps an allusion to Hell and Dante’s novel Inferno, as the character Virgil guides people through Hell which parallels the role of the Public Relation’s man who guides visitors through the ward. The ward, of course, is symbolic of Hell itself as it is the center of the machine which attempts…
Through his fire and brimstone teachings Edwards evokes an immense amount of fear in his listeners. To further impart the feeling upon his audience Edwards uses the rhetorical device pathos. Pathos “appeals to the audience’s emotions “(NMSI 13). This helps Edwards to reinforce his purpose and persuade his audience. Edwards informs his audience that “[unconverted men] are now the objects of that very same anger and wrath of God, that is expressed in the torments of hell” (Edwards 40). By telling his listeners that there is just as much anger directed at them as there is expressed in hell Edwards fuels their fear and shows them the horror they face by not converting which in turn persuades them even further to be “born again”. Though, this is…
In his sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” from the 1740’s, The American minister Jonathan Edwards, uses similes and metaphors to intimidate and manipulate the hearts of his puritan listeners. He uses a metaphor to dramatize human weakness. He states the human has as much chance of keeping out of hell " as a spider's web would have to stop a fallen rock." Meaning that the sinners will be presumably going to hell if they don’t do something about it. Another metaphor reads, “ The wrath of God is like great waters that are damned for the present; they increase more and more, and rise higher and higher, till an outlet is given; and the longer the stream is stopped, the more rapid and might is its course, when once it is let loose .”, meaning that all the sins throughout the time have built up and eventually the damn will break and Gods wrath will be let loose upon the sinners of the world. What the sinners depended on peace and safety but to the angry god, “peace and safety were nothing but thin and empty shadows.” Edwards states, “ you have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince; and yet nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment.” The sinners have taken advantage of God, used him, manipulated him, but they are the ones that need him the most and they expect him to help them not enter the “wide and bottomless pit, full of fire and wrath.” “God’s wrath is bent, and the arrow made ready on the string, and justice bends the arrow at your heart and strains the bow, and it’s nothing but the mere pleasure of God, and that of an angry God, without any promise or obligation at all, that keeps the arrow one moment away from being made drunk with your blood.” Edwards is saying that God would string a bow and point it at your heart to know he means commerce, and he is willing to stick that arrow up your heart just so you would know your lesson. Therefore, Edwards uses many similes and metaphors to…
First, the author uses imagery to vividly explain the sufferable experience sinners will have in hell. For instance in the ninth paragraph Jonathan Edwards coldly states, " When you look forward, you shall see a long for ever, a boundless duration before you, which will swallow up your thoughts, and amaze your soul , and you will absolutely despair of ever having any deliverance,…
Jonathan Edwards shows great anger in this sermon through the use of metaphors, personification, and diction.…
Jonathan Edwards uses metaphors to connect to the people’s everyday lives. He tells them that their sin is as “heavy as led” and will pull them straight down to hell. “Your wickedness makes you as it were as heavy as lead, and…
He uses repetition to throughout the sermon to express his sharp tone. He reiterates "...and nothing to lay hold of to save yourself, nothing to keep off the flames of wrath, nothing of your own, nothing that you ever have done, nothing that you can do, to induce God to spare you one moment"(7) Edwards is emphasizing that no one has the power of a God and that there is nothing a man can do to save himself. In addition, Edwards repeats "wrath" throughout the sermon as the major theme to persuade the readers that God's wrath controls the fates of the people, but it also keeps them alive. Moreover, Edwards effectively uses diction to scare people into becoming "reborn" to have them be the believers of God. He states, "There is the dreadful pit of the glowing flames of the wrath of God..."(5) Edwards describes the pit of flames as "dreadful" to use powerful diction to clearly and potently express his point to the…
Pathos- this is effectively used frequently through out the text so that the speaker gets the audience to be emotional. An example of this is when he says “ to be abandoned by god is worse than to be punished by him” (444). By saying this, the speaker get the audience to empathize with the victim, put themselves in the victims shoes, which gets the emotions and feeling across to all the members of the audience and get then engaged. He uses human emotion as a way to speak out against the holocaust and then speaks of the horrors of it to trigger emotion from the audience “Over there, behind the black gates of Auschwitz, the most tragic of all prisoners were the “Muselmanner” as they called. Wrapped in their torn blankets, they would sit or lie on the ground, staring vacantly into space, unaware of who or where they were—strangers to their surroundings...” (444). This creates a feeling of horror and helps the…
The entirety of the Inferno is structured around the imagery that Dante uses to depict the rings of hell. Therefore imagery is the literary device that Dante uses most frequently to intensify the horror of the mutilation that is forced upon the sinners.…
In the sermon, “Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God,” Jonathan Edwards persuades to his audience that all the sinners deserve to be dropped into hell. He does this by using literary devices to emphasize that God is disappointed at the sinners but he still has mercy for the sinners. Edwards uses alliteration, imagery, and a combination of repetition and parallelism.…
“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” is a sermon given by Johnathan Edwards, a preacher and a theologian. Published in 1741, Edwards’ sermon is one of most defining pieces of literature during the First Great Awakening in the United States. The Day of Doom is a poem written by Michael Wigglesworth, a Puritan minister. The poem became wildly popular in Puritan New England when it was published in 1662. Both texts discuss the themes of divine judgement and punishment. Edwards’ sermon illustrates that it is God’s will that keeps evil men from being sent down to hell. Wigglesworth describes the Day of Judgement in which God will decide who will be saved who will be sent to hell. These pieces of religious literature both describe a harsh God who has ultimate judgement and no mercy when it comes to punishment.…
We all know Hell is a term used for the place where the deceased go down in the underworld to be punished for their sins. When we talk about Hell, it’s used as an expression to describe some kind of intense feeling. Hell can be the destruction of mankind or it can be a place that has been destroyed. In the novel Tomorrow, When the War Began, Hell is used to describe the new world that Ellie and her friends now live in.…