The Sisters: Chiaroscuro

Here's another list of rhetorical tools: http://www.virtualsalt.com/rhetoric.htm. Although this site is not nearly as extensive as the Silva Rhetoricae, it's more user friendly.

Today I'd like to feature a rhetorical technique that neither virtualsalt.com nor the BYU humanities department included in their compilations: chiaroscuro. Chiaroscuro is the artistic balancing of light and darkness. It's one of the most common - and in my opinion, most powerful - techniques used in literature. Here's an example from "The Sisters," the first short story in Joyce's Dubliners collection:

"There was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke. Night after night I had passed the house (it was vacation time) and studied the lighted square of window: and night after night I had found it lighted in the same way, faintly and evenly. If he was dead, I thought, I would see the reflection of candles on the darkened blind for I knew that two candles must be set at the head of a corpse. He had often said to me: "I am not long for this world," and I had thought his words idle. Now I knew they were true. Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work."

All of us inherently sense what darkness symbolizes. In this passage, darkness is closely associated with hopelessness, death, maleficence or evil, sin, and fear. Light embodies the opposite qualities; the passage above juxtaposes light with life and truth, but in any religion, light is also a common symbol of revelation, goodness, and deity.

How can chiaroscuro enhance your own writing?