Welcome back to the final chapter of figures of speech in Harry Potter edition. In our previous post, we discussed how Rowling uses similes and metaphors throughout the Harry Potter series to enrich the readers’ experience and help them teleport to the magical world of Hogwarts. If you haven’t checked the first part of the series, we highly recommend you do that now! Others, please continue to read.
In this particular segment, we shall learn about some other kinds of literary tools evident throughout the Harry Potter sequence, while simultaneously ensuring it’s all fun and games and nothing too taxing. The literary devices covered in this section are personification, alliteration and onomatopoeia. So, what’s the wait for? Let’s dive right into it!
1. Personification
— The Hat tells them, "Try me on and I will tell you / Where you ought to be."
Making a grand appearance at #1 on our list is personification—the heartbeat of every children’s fiction ever. When defined literally, personification is giving human-like qualities to something abstract or a non-living entity.
Since personification majorly thrives on the reader’s imagination, Rowling has used this figure of speech in the best possible way to bring the world of Harry Potter to life. Be it through the “wand [that] chooses the wizard” or “Harry's broom jumped into his hand at once,” the book is full of endless illustrations of this literary tool.
However, nothing beats the anticipation and excitement in the scene where Harry is about to be sorted into his house and the entire hall is brimming with impatience, until the sorting hat, at last, declares, “Well if you're sure, better be... GRYFFINDOR!”
2. Alliteration
Next up on our list is the easiest and every child’s preferred figure of speech, alliteration. Remember that tongue twister you challenged your best friend and classmates to take? Fun fact! That’s one of the perfect examples of alliteration. So, in the simplest of terms, alliteration is nothing but a bunch of words placed together that begin with the same consonant sounds.
To look for instances of alliteration through Rowling’s Harry Potter, you won’t have to hustle hard because they are literally everywhere. For instance, Minerva McGonagall, Severus Snape, Godric Gryffindor, Helga Hufflepuff, Salazar Slytherin, Moaning Myrtle, among others, are all examples of alliterative names in the series.
Dig a little deeper and you will find alliteration through Lockhart’s "Fame is a fickle friend, Harry" to Professor McGonagall’s angry speech of “I will not have you…besmirching that name by behaving like a babbling, bumbling band of baboons!”
Professor McGonagall, in fact, is the flag bearer of alliteration in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire where she treats dancing as both feminine (inside every girl, a secret swan slumbers) and masculine (inside every boy, a lordly lion prepared to prance) through impressive use of alliteration.
3. Onomatopoeia
— There was a bang, and Harry felt his hands fly off Mundungus's throat.
Gasping and spluttering, Mundungus seized his fallen case, then—CRACK—he disapparated.
Think of alliteration, and onomatopoeia isn’t far away. In layman terms, onomatopoeia refers to words that evoke or imitate the sound they refer to. They are the part of auditory images that are used to make writing livelier and more appealing to the audience.
Rowling, being the genius mind she is, uses onomatopoeia to the best of its capability through various instances across the Harry Potter series. Be it the dramatic entry of Hagrid in Potter’s life on the midnight of his birthday with “SMASH! The door was hit with such force that it swung clean off its hinges and with a deafening crash landed flat on the floor,” Uncle Vernon’s “Barking, howling mad, the lot of them” or Neville’s trademark ability to smash things in “There was another tinkle of breaking china; Neville had smashed his second cup,” sounds govern the magical world of Harry Potter as much as visuals do.
Well, here we end our figures of speech series in a Harry Potter edition with the hope that you have all successfully befriended literary devices and they don’t seem that daunting anymore. Hence, our fellow wizards and witches, we proudly conclude that you are all set to take the world of exams by storm. Just remember, ‘Avada Kedavra!’ aka let’s go, kill it!
Image Source:
Harry Potter and the Sorting Hat [https://www.popsugar.com/entertainment/Harry-Potter-Sorting-Hat-Biased-Theory-44705042]
Harry, Ron and Lockhart [https://screenrant.com/harry-potter-things-only-book-fans-know-about-gilderoy-lockhart/]
Harry Potter and Fletcher [https://potterwars.wordpress.com/2016/02/25/throwback-thursday-mundunguss-morals/]