Anticlimax (Bathos)

Anticlimax is a slackening of tension in a sentence or a longer piece of utterance in which the ideas expressed fall off in dignity or become of less importance. Anticlimax is often achieved by adding a humorous or an ironical detail to the utterance which weakens the impression of the preceding idea.

e.g. A woman who could face the very devil himself – or a mouse – loses her grip and goes all to pieces in front of a flash of lightning. (M. Twain)

e.g. Harris never weeps, he knows not why. If Harris’s eyes fill with tears, you can bet it is because Harris has been eating raw onions… (Jerome)

Bathos is akin (сродни) to anticlimax. The difference lies in the fact that in bathos we descend from noble or high to low.

e.g. The first lord in the country – and the last beggar – are equal in the face of the Law.

Antithesis

(from the Greek ‘antithesis’ –противоположение)

In order to characterize a thing or phenomenon from a specific point of view, it may be necessary to find points of its resemblance or association between it and some other thing or phenomenon, or to find points of sharp contrast.

e.g. saint - devil

hell - heaven, paradise

to reign - to serve

Logical and stylistic opposition should not be confused. Any opposition will be based on the contrasting features of 2 objects. These contrasting features are represented in pairs of words which are called antonyms. Stylistic opposition or antithesis is of different linguistic nature: it is based on relative opposition arising in context.

e.g. His lessons were light and his fees high.

The words ‘light’ and ‘high’ are not antonyms, but drawn into a pair of sentences with parallel construction they seem to express antonymous ideas. The antagonistic features of the 2 objects or phenomena are more easily perceived when they stand out in similar structures. If the structural design of antithesis is not conspicuously marked in the utterance, the effect might be lost.

Sometimes it is difficult to single out the elements which distinguish antithesis from logical opposition. Thus, in Dickens’s “A Tale of Two Cities” the first paragraph is practically built on opposing pairs:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.

(Dickens)

Here the structural pattern of the utterance, the pairs of objective antonyms as well as of those on which the antonymical meanings are imposed by the force of analogy – makes the whole paragraph stylistically significant and the general device which makes it is therefore antithesis.

Antithesis is a device bordering between stylistics and logic. The extremes are easily seen, but most cases are intermediate. However, it is essential to distinguish between antithesis and contrast which is a literary (not a linguistic) device based on logical opposition between the phenomena set one against another.