Use of alliteration in prose

[Jas09]

Here is a dramatic use of alliteration - the closing paragraph of Joyce’s The Dead:

“His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

Rather more restrained than some of the other examples, but Joyce certainly uses alliteration in other places as well. As does Nabokov in Lolita, even past that first line - he particularly has the narrator use it during descriptions of his debauchery. Alliteration is all over that book (as well as other poetic structures) - the dissonance between the language and actions of the narrator is part of the point.

[Exapno_Mapcase]

@pulykamell

You might want to re-read Lolita. Alliteration, rhyme, assonance, pretty much every poetic device is used to great extent in Loltia. I just randomly opened to a page, and I get this:

“..she was weeping in my arms;–a salutory storm of sobs” And a few sentences later " …a dot of blackness in the blue of my bliss."

And that’s just a random page (I suppose I got lucky.)

Probably. When I checked the book before I posted I checked several random pages and found none.

[pulykamell]

Returning to the OP, another major one that jumps to mind: Melville was quite fond of alliteration in his work, for example, from Moby Dick:

“There was an infinity of firmest fortitude, a determinate unsurrenderable wilfulness, in the fixed and fearless, forward dedication of that glance.”

[TriPolar]

Although not simple alliteration, I’ve found this little piece to contain important alliterative qualities.

@Abraham Lincoln

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate – we can not consecrate – we can not hallow – this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion – that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

[OpalCat]

It is really interesting to see all these examples!

[pulykamell]

Here’s an example from Faulkner’s “Rose for Emily”:

“and when they sat down a faint dust rose sluggishly about their thighs, spinning with slow motes in the single sun-ray.”

The alliterative imagery at the end of Capote’s In Cold Blood:

“Then, starting home, he walked toward the trees, and under them, leaving behind him the big sky, the whisper of wind voices in the wind-bent wheat.”

Or, how about the final line of The Great Gatsby"

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Or Hemingway’s “In Our Time”:

“Women and kids were in the carts crouched with mattresses, mirrors, sewing machines, bundles.”

If you pay attention, I think you will find alliteration is used much more often in prose than you think. Like I said before, you don’t want to overuse it, as it can quickly get distracting, but I’d be hard-pressed to find a good writer who doesn’t pay attention to the sounds of their words and employs alliteration tastefully in their work.