In the above excerpt, what literary or rhetorical device is used?

You u have to give the excerpt! so we can read it and figure out what kind of rhetoric it is.

the excerpt is:

Of course we could try to forget the past. Why not? Is it not nature for a human being to repress what causes him pain, what causes him shame? Like the body, memory protects its wounds. When day breaks after a sleepless night, one’s ghosts must withdraw; the dead are ordered back to their graves. But for the first time in history, we could not bury our dead. We bear their graves within ourselves. For us, forgetting was never an option.