Some rhetorical terms to look for examples of in Pinter's The Birthday Party

1. Common:
•	Allliteration - same letters used repeatedly - "Be bloody, bold, and resolute".
•	Pun - word with two meanings
•	Epithet - adjective describing a noun. "Good Queen Bess", "That accursed computer".
•	Antithesis - any balanced pair, often introduced by either/or: "Help your friends and hinder your enemies".
•	Proverbs - "Many hands make light work" 
•	Clichés - "I am as sick as a parrot".

 2. Rarer:
•	Onomatopoeia - words/sentences that sound like what they describe: eg., "whisper", "slither".
•	Tricolon - any set of three, moving to a climax - "I came, I saw, I conquered!"
•	Anaphora - repetition of same word and phrase in several clauses. eg. "I" in example above.
•	Asyndeton - missing out connecting words: "I came, I saw, I conquered", rather than, "I came, and then I saw, and then after that I conquered".
•	Bathos - a deflating effect, when we were expecting something grander - "They found treasure! - a silver box, with a gold box inside it, and inside that, a small ham sandwich". 
•	Chiasmus - any set of words with the shape ABBA inside it, e.g., "All lovely, loving all". "I trusted the computer, and the computer betrayed me".
•	Periphrasis / euphemism - when something isn't named, but is described in an indirect way. Eg instead of "ratcatcher", "rodent control and management officer".

 3. Even rarer:
•	Apostrophe - addressing something that can't answer back - eg "you stupid computer! I don't like what you're doing."
•	Personification - "The computer is looking at me nastily". (Example above, similarly)
•	Rhetorical question - looks like a question, is really a statement - eg "My essay has been deleted. What did I do to deserve this?" really means "I didn't do anything to deserve this".
•	Synecdoche - the part for the whole. eg "Sanctions will hurt Saddam Hussein" - what you mean is, they will weaken the regime he's in charge of.
•	Oxymoron - a contradiction in terms - "O icy fire!" or "Darkness visible".
•	Tautology - saying the same thing twice.  "He came from the Yorkshire town of Sheffield, in Yorkshire".  

4. Exotic:
•	Zeugma - E.g. the following example: "she left in floods of tears, and a taxi". "In" does double duty for both phrases, which are thus "yoked" together. Often absurd.
•	Hypallage - transferred epithet - "Here comes Jim in his smartarse leather coat" - you actually mean that Jim is a smartarse, but the epithet gets transferred to his coat.
•	Anadiplosis - starting one phrase with the same word that finished the previous one - "My name was Martha, Martha took much pain..."
•	Anacoluthon - where the syntax is deliberately left unfinished, to indicate distress on the part of the speaker. (Common, but unintentional, in student essays.) eg. "If you had been there you could have - but there's no use in thinking about it now."
•	Occupatio - saying something while seeming to avoid saying it - [eg of a political rival] "I'm not going to drag up those allegations about his arms dealing, I'm not going to talk about his conviction for speeding. I'm not going to talk about what I know about his seedy love life. After all, this election is about policies not personalities."
•	Correctio - pointedly correcting yourself - "And my rival's arms dealing - sorry, legitimate business trips abroad - have led him into some embarrassing situations".

For a fuller list see:  Richard A. Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms (Berkeley, CA: California UP, 1968). Robert Harris, A Handbook of Rhetorical Devices (1980) - etext available from Vanguard University. Recommended. http://www.vanguard.edu/rharris/rhetoric.htm