Commentary for IB Literature Facebook sonnet - Essay Example

Overall, the poem evokes a keen melancholic sense of the narrator primarily due to his or her feelings of loneliness because of the lack of human warmth and the losses one suffers because of it. The author deftly deploys several literary devices such as allegory, metaphors, similes and symbolism to depict the character’s emotions and illustrate the disdainful stage of his or her mind. Rendered in sonnet structure, the poem opens with reminiscences of the narrator about the high school reunions, which now occurs over the internet through social networking sites.

The author uses symbolism here to allude to the facelessness of social networking interactions by alluding to the fact that people welcome friends and lovers from the past irrespective of whether they are “kind or cruel” (Alexie, 2011, L. 3). This further suggests that people are indiscreet when they interact with others through online media, without knowing a person’s intentions are good or bad. Besides, the narrator also points to the situation that people in the modern day, dwell on unnecessary elements from the past which makes them “undervalue” the present and, therefore, they fail to mend the wrongs they do in the present.

Thus, through illustrating the attitudes of the modern humans through symbolism the author demonstrates the absence of human warmth in their lives which saddens the narrator. The author deploys the literary device of allegory to show that humans in the modern day have become mechanical and they eschew everything natural because of their obsession with technology such as internet and social networking. He refers to the situation where people need to “exhume, resume, and extend” their childhood, which apparently is the most innocent and natural period in every person’s life (L. 7). He further emphasizes that every stage of human life should be same or in other words, he means that it is essential for