Deathwatch

“When you come out into this dessert and risk your life stalking one of the smartest and wariest animals in the world, and you outsmart him and take him on his own ground, you’ve accomplished something. That’s something you’ll never understand.” 

This passage foreshadows the plot and provides a window into Madec’s motives. He views hunting as a game and equates winning with a point of pride; this likely fuels his need to outsmart and kill Ben. He also reveals that he believes that there is a hard line limiting what Ben is capable of understanding.

“The heat seemed to have killed every sound. It was as though he were in an enormous bowl of silence; as though from the purple mountains sixty miles east to the brown mountains forty miles west all sound had been silenced by the intense, still heat.” 

In this description of the setting, White uses a simile to illustrate not only the silence of the desert but also the topography of the landscape. He crafts a rich portrait by weaving together the temperature, the silence, and the color and location of the mountains.

“The sound of the gun was absolutely enormous. It was as though it had shattered the ground and cracked the blue vault of the sky and rolled the mountains back. The thing roared and echoed and lunged into the silence and seemed to roll on, mile after mile, never to stop.” 

White again uses simile to create a vivid description. In this example, he also uses synesthesia, or the blending of sensory descriptions. “Enormous” typically refers to something that is seen, but White uses it to describe sound. White further enriches the description of the sound of the gun through personification, endowing it with the ability to lunge and roll.