In Sherriff’s play Journey’s End, Sherriff makes a recurring point of soldiers ‘coping’ with the war by making trivial things big and big things small, so much so that deviation from this theme leads to stress among characters.
Is there a name for this technique? What are the advantages of this technique to evoke pathos, as used in literature more generally? I can imagine this technique being used in satirical works, but I am primarily interested in non-satirical works like Sherriff's, as I am more interested in how this technique evokes pathos than humour.
