How Is The Metaphor Used In The Raven

What evokes more fear than spiders? A man has a nightmare about spiders before he wakes up in a cold sweat and tries to calm himself. In “Hunt”, Alvarez uses the motif of spiders, sibilance, and paragraph length variation to convey the character’s state of mind as fragmented to convince us as the reader to empathize with someone whose reality may differ from ours.
Using spiders as a motif highlights how the character’s irrational thinking has fundamentally impacted his sense of reality through the amount of tension that he experiences in the three separate sections of the short story. In the first section, the nightmare by which the main character is tormented, he sees a ginormous spider towering over him. “King spider, the size of a young

In the nightmare sequence, the /s/ sound is used to show the extreme level of tension the main character experiences. “sandy” (line 1); “dustpan,” “sat,” “soot” (line 2); “fireplace,” “bricks,” “missing,” “supposed” (line 3); “smoke,” “trace,” “sand” (line 4); “sweep,” “soot” (line 5); “spiders,” “small” (line 6); “first,” “scrambled,” “soot” (line 7); “spiders,” “slithered” (line 8) “pressing,” “against” (line 9); “swifter,” “squeezed” (line 11); “silently,” “spider” (line 12); “size,” “once,” “pressed” (line 13); “against,” “soot” (line 14); “twist (line 16); “this,” “balance,” “towards,” “least,” “sudden,” (line 17); “himself,” “staring,” “stock-still” (line 18); and “soles” (line 19). The frequency of sibilance is 13.05% (41 out of 314 words had an /s/ sound) in the nightmare, which directly corresponds to his elevated levels of tension; once he awakens from his dream, the frequency of sibilance drops to 12.80% (21 out of 164 words). “staring”, “space” (line 20); “chest,” “Betsy” (line 21); “slowly,” “slow” (line 22); “sleep,” “swell,” “stroked” (line 23); “darkness,” “spiders,” “settled,” “against” (line 24); “studied” (line 25); “so,” “sweater” (line 27); “softly,” “darkness” (line 28); “listening,” “basket” (line 29); and “its” (line 30). On the other hand, the frequency of sibilance rises to 12.96% (7 out

In the first section of the short story, lines 1–19, Conrad experiences a nightmare about spiders; paragraph 1 consists of 10 lines, whereas paragraph 2 decreases to 9 lines. The nightmare sequence comprises more than half of the total length of the short story (19 out of 35 lines, 54.29%), which highlights how his obsession with spiders causes his tension to increase, thus lessening his state of mind. Immediately after he wakes from the nightmare, feeling frightened and embarrassed, he finds respite from the spiders in reality by embracing his wife. In the last paragraph in this section, he leaves bed. This section is shorter than the nightmare (11 out of 35 lines, 31.43%) and contains the shortest paragraph (4 lines, 11.43%). What is significant about this is that it shows that he finds comfort in reality, where there are no spiders to intimidate him; he is at his least tense. Because he feels ashamed and embarrassed, but only at first, his unstable state of mind settles down. Unfortunately, when he enters the attic and sees the mirrors, he is brought back to his former irrational state. Although Alvarez could have ended “Hunt” at “switched on the lights,” he continues with spider imagery to highlight