The Picture of Dorian Gray 1

Passage: "The dim roar of London was like the bourdon note of a distant organ."

Among the florid, and flowing words in the beginning of the novel, the passage above sticks out, deliberately, to express its qualities of foreshadowing to the reader. Chapter 1 begins with a deep, slow moving (due to use of adjectives), "light summer wind" like diction. The immense imagery is due to the deep detail of the flowers; forcing the reader to imagine what they look like. Then comes the passage above, the last sentence of the second paragraph (syntax), that is not abruptly thrown into the readers view, but still drastically differs from the rest. It is clearly foreshadowing due to the words "dim", and "distant". They not only begin with the letter "d", to show emphasis on their importance, but also share similar denotation and connotation. The word "distant" means far off, which portrays a sense of perception, alluding to something in "the distance" that could, as the story progresses, relate closer to the plot. The start of the passage begins with the paradox "the dim roar" which is in reference to London. The word "dim" contrasts the word "roar" to bring more focus and emphasis to the importance of the sentence, alluding to the relevance the "roar" of London will have as the novel progresses.

The passage holds syntactical relevance in that it is deliberately placed in the beginning of Chapter 1, and is placed at the end of the second paragraph. All sentences leading up to the above passage use words like: "rich", "light", "beauty", "honey", "heavy", "delicate"- that portray a languid and peaceful diction, which emphasizes the relevance. The sentence isn't so drastically abrupt because of the soft diction used to portray the profound foreshadowing; the words "dim" and "distant"are used to counteract the biting sounds of "roar" and "bourdon", portraying a bleak, but still soft tone. Through parallelism and simile, the "The dim roar" is directly correlated with "the bourdon note", and "London" Is directly correlated with "a distant organ". The parallelism further defines "the dim roar", and "London", by using the same structure to say "the bourdon note", and "a distant organ".