Nightmares turn into reality, and spiders surround you from all sides. “Hunt” involves a man whothat suffers from a nightmare and ultimately wakes up alarmedalarmingly to a calm and quiet house. In “Hunt”, Alvarez uses the metaphors of spiders compared to nightmares, ellipsis, and paragraph length, to demonstrate how the character's state of mind is fragmented in nightmares to show that others may view reality differently, whichand that is fundamentally acceptable.
Throughout the work, Alvarez uses thean extended metaphor of spiders and nightmares to contribute to the grim and tense setting that Alvarez wanted to show so the reader understands the attitude of the short story. Within the nightmare, spiders swarm around the main character. As
…show more content…
During the nightmare when the spiders appeared from the rift, the king spider was introduced: ”King spider, the size of a young dog,” (line 11). The sentence creates a break in the story structure to signify how large the spider is. The order in which the sentence was formed put the name of the spider as a priority to create a new tone. In addition to the ellipsis, seen within the story; in the last paragraph there is an increase of them. “Mere gloom” (line 35). Short breaks in the story cause more intensity, as it leaves out information that the reader could have had. It raises questions and causes the reader to connect with the text to fully understand what is happening. Adding on, in the attic the character sees himself in the mirrors and describes, “Like the dream spiders, he thought, but without the power of dreams” (line 34). In this case, the author useshe’s using ellipsis to exhibit the mirror looking like the spiders in his dream because he is portraying the similarities from the reflection. This perspective introduces the idea that his nightmare might have appeared in reality. Using ellipses creates pauses in the story to highlight significant changes within the story and change of