Dual Personas Revealed in The Epilogue of "The Tempest" and The Custom House of "The Scarlet Letter"

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It’s 6:30 a.m. and the alarm clock begins to ring. I get up and get ready for school. I arrive at school and see that everyone is happy and talkative. I feel normal, not really willing to talk or even smile. I feel very different from others. I hardly talk and I just don’t feel like myself at school. Once the bell rings to go home, I burst out the doors and out to be myself again. I’m two completely different people. At school, I’m just a regular serious kid. When I get home, that’s where the party begins and when I am able to become myself again. I get pumped up at my house and I start screaming, dancing, singing, or jumping around. This is the real me. I can’t really explain why I can’t be myself at school too. I’m just two completely different people. With this I can relate to The Epilogue in “The Tempest” and to The Custom House in “The Scarlet Letter”. Both “The Tempest” and “The Scarlet Letter” have dual personas. The passages reveal their differences in the author’s dual purposes through the use of some rhetorical devices.

Some of the rhetorical devices that reveal the differences in the author’s purpose is diction. In The Epilogue of “The Tempest”, Shakespeare uses a lot of effective words. Shakespeare used words such as “confined” to tell us that Prospero was trapped in the island and he doesn’t want to go back to Naples. He also uses words like “release me from my bands”. He means that with our help we should release him with our applause. These are some examples of the diction that Shakespeare uses. Shakespeare’ s diction is a very important part of the play. For The Custom House Nathaniel Hawthorne uses formal diction. It is very formal because he uses words such as “truculency” and “vixenly”. He uses many formal wor...

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...h the use of some rhetorical devices. The passages reveal the differences in the author’s dual purposes through the use of diction, tone, and personas. The most interesting of these three rhetorical devices was persona. It’s really interesting when a writer like Shakespeare writes a story or play using other characters and at the same time is telling his own personal life. The same goes for Nathaniel Hawthorne. There were two personas in “The Scarlet Letter”, one telling the story of the scarlet letter and the other, making a satirical statement about the state of contemporary politics. To me, this is amazing and makes me relate to it, remembering of those times at school where I feel awkward and feel as a different person but as soon as I get home I feel like my own self once again and I realized that we can all have two different personas in ourselves.

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