Lyricism

Aiken brought the poet's sensibility and craft tohis fiction. He narrates "Silent Snow, Secret Snow" from Paul's point-of-view; this perspective guarantees that the author's stream-of-consciousness prose style will affect readers directly. Not surprisingly, one finds a large number of lyric poems in Aiken's verse. Aiken also utilizes the material properties of words. For example, the pervasive alliteration, with its repeated "s" sounds, already appears in the story's title. In addition, Aiken manages to endow his prose with the naturalness of colloquial speech.Although couched in the third person, Aiken's narration remains faithful to the linguistic style of a twelve-year-old boy.

Grammar

In "Silent Snow, Secret Snow," Aiken's depiction of insanity begins at the grammatical level.In the opening paragraph, for example, Paul thinks of the snow—the initial stages of his madness—and refers to it with the pronoun "it": "Just why it should have happened...