Literary Devices in Home

These last sounds echo Yevgeny’s musings. After Seryozha heads to bed, the sound of the lulling piano quiets; all that remains, is the sound of the metronomic, ordered pacing. This final image lends to a sense of harmony after Yevgeny is able to convince Seryozha to stop smoking.

Adam, the first human created according to Jewish and Christian theology, serves as a biblical allusion to the Genesis story, which details the creation of earth and humankind. By mentioning Adam, Yevgeny speaks to the universality and timelessness of storytelling.

Yevgeny’s world is like a courtroom: one of logic, order, and methodology. He cannot comprehend why his son would draw something so unlike his reality and finds fault with the crooked roof, the zigzagging lightning bolt, and the soldier who stands taller than a house. In his effort to understand the drawing, Yevgeny even compares the shape of the bayonet to the shape of the number four. In contrast, Seryozha makes sense of the disproportionally large soldier, because, he claims, that if he drew the soldier any smaller, “you would not see his eyes.” While Yevgeny cannot fathom a world of disorder, Seryozha finds logic in it.

Seryozha’s naive and poetic understanding of death is captured in Chekhov’s imagery. He does not see death as final; rather, he envisions death as the transport of loved ones from the earth to the “sky beside the stars.”

This parenthetical interjection, unlike the others, employs irony. Yevgeny is attempting to prevent his son from smoking, despite the fact that he smokes himself. Yevgeny recognizes that his logic is irrational, and jokes to himself about how clever he is.

This is the first instance of an interjection formatted within parentheses. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Chekhov’s literary predecessor, was one of the first authors to use parenthetical interjections. For example, in Dostoevsky's novella Notes from Underground (1864), the author inserts parentheses to speak directly to the reader. In Chekhov’s story, the internal monologues, some of which are formatted within parentheses, have a similar effect. They provide space for asides and digressions that allow the reader to glimpse into the internal dialogue of a character’s mind.

This description plays into the image of the boy as an Edenic, virginal cherub. All of these descriptors associate the boy with purity and fragility. Everything about him is soft, down to the velvet on his jacket. He is even likened to a “hot-house plant,” which is a sort of plant that requires certain greenhouse conditions to survive. With the use of this simile, Chekhov suggests that Seryozha needs a nurturing environment in order to flourish.