Figurative Language In Annie Dillard's An American Childhood

There are thousands of novels written every year, and only a select few win awards. It’s a competitive market, and the Pulitzer Prize is one of the toughest to win. Back in 1939 (wikipedia.com), The Yearling won this prestigious award. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings deserved the Pulitzer Prize for her novel for many reasons, including her creative uses of figurative language, syntax, and sensory details. Her several uses of figurative language enhanced her writing by describing the situations in the novel in creative ways.

According to David Foster Wallace, default setting is when we believe ourselves to be the “absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence.” In his “This is Water” speech, he continues to explain that we have a choice of what to think about and we “get to decide how we’re going to try to see it.” It would be not just looking at something small, but looking at something as a whole. While Annie Dillard’s “Seeing” doesn’t make reference to his idea of default setting, her essay still had plenty of points about the idea of seeing other things. In Annie Dillard’s “Seeing” she show multiples examples of not just looking at yourself, but rather at the smaller things that people would never really see unless they were to really try to look and see.

Let Me Go by Helga Schneider presents us with a story line of a young lady whose mother abandoned her. The reason for the turn away was because of the mothers turns to Nazism. She became a Concentration Camp guard as a corrections unit. In which she is in charge of all the nasty tortures and foul play that goes on in the Holocaust. When Helga and her mother meet again, Helga is filled with anger and one may say hatred towards her mother.

“The carpet near Bertis’s foot resembles a run-over squirrel, but Karen’s seen worse.” (Coupland 138) The imagery in this novel keeps the reader engaged by prompting their own imagination to visual the setting. Without the author’s skillful choice of words the imagery in this novel would have greatly

This is a summary of “A Christmas Story” by Annie Dillard. Every Christmas there was a massive dinner held in a seemingly never-ending dining hall. It was lavish and spacious with a table that was as long as a river and was decorated with many different table cloths and decorations. The ceiling of the hall was covered in chandeliers and the floor was filled with different groupings of people: the sick and injured, the children, to those who wanted to dance or participate in games or various others who gathered in separate sections throughout the hall.

This is depicted when I travelled to Alabama as a camp counselor to help youths for a week. During that time, I met a nine year old girl who was smitten with a young boy. Every day, she would arrive at camp wearing the best clothes she could find, spending her time following the young boy like a lost puppy. One day, I asked her why she doesn’t play with everyone else. She responded, “I want to be successful, therefore, I need to find someone that I can marry to take care of me.”

In The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton, the author, uses an array of figurative language in her writing. She uses similes, idioms, and hyperboles in her book to make them interesting and intriguing. Similes help compare scenarios, idioms interpret a meaning by giving an object a role, and hyperboles exaggerate an action. Figurative language captures the reader's attention and gives sensory detail.

He employs a reminiscent tone to appeal to the emotions of the readers, making them, too, yearn to relive their childhood days of family car rides. Louv writes, “In our useful boredom, we used our fingers to draw pictures on fogged glass as we watched the telephone poles tick by. We saw birds on the wires and combines in the fields” (lines 62-65). This imagery paints a picture of the nature one sees as a child and helps the reader relive the experience. Louv ends the piece with the statement, “We considered the past and dreamed of the future, and watched it all go by in the blink of an eye” (lines 71-73).

Annie Dillard’s essay “Sight into Insight” emphasizes how one must live in the moment and not sway towards others opinions in order to gain accurate observations on a situation. She uses nature as a prominent theme in her essay to represent the thought of looking past the superficial obvious in order to go deeper to where the hidden beauty rests. Dillard wants the reader to realize in order to observe clearly you have to live in the moment and let go of the knowledge you think you know on the situation. Dillard uses the example of her “walking with a camera vs walking without one” (para.31) and how her own observations differed with each. When she walked with the camera she “read the light” (para.31), and when she didn’t “light printed” (para.31).

Prose Analysis Essay In Ann Petry’s The Street, the urban setting is portrayed as harsh and unforgiving to most. Lutie Johnson, however, finds the setting agreeable and rises to challenges posed by the city in order to achieve her goals. Petry portrays this relationship through personification, extended metaphor, and imagery.

In the excerpt from “Cherry Bomb” by Maxine Clair, the narrator makes use of diction, imagery and structure to characterize her naivety and innocent memories of her fifth-grade summer world. The diction employed throughout the passage signifies the narrator’s background and setting. The narrator’s choice of words illustrates how significant those memories were to her. Specific words help build the narrator’s Midwestern background with items like the locust, cattails and the Bible.

In Annie Dillard’s story The Deer at Providencia, she talks about her experiences with suffering in life. The message that Dillard is trying to convey is that nobody can escape suffering, so we have to learn to accept it as a part of life. The first example of this message is when Dillard sees the deer at Providencia for the last time, and she glances at the deer pityingly and says the Spanish equivalent of “poor little thing.” However, after that Dillard says that she “knew at the time it was a ridiculous thing to say (Dillard 44).” This proves that she acknowledges the suffering it is experiencing, but knows that it is futile to point it out, as suffering is inescapable- it is a part of life.

Throughout the book, An American Childhood, by Annie Dillard, Dillard uses the metaphor of waking up to describe herself growing up. Overall, I think Dillard does a good job of representing the different stages of her childhood through this metaphor. Dillard first mentions the metaphor of waking up stating that “ I was just waking up then, just barely. Other things were changing. ”(10) and that “I woke up in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years.

She’s regretting her decision on marrying Curley, and wishes her life would’ve went as planned. The novel illustrates an image of Candy’s sense of loneliness, and how friendship is only achieved by conversation. The novel illustrates an image of Candy’s sense of loneliness, and how friendship is the only achieved through conversation.

Snow serves as a symbol of the love the couple once shared together. The narrator explains the night of the “big snow”, “Remember the night, out on the lawn, knee-deep in snow, chins pointed to the sky as the wind whirled down all that whiteness?” (108) which is a symbol of the climax of the love and happiness shared between the two lovers. However, the narrator uses the idea of snow once again, “just a few dots of white, no field of snow” (109) to contrast the previous image. The few dots of white symbolize the absence or dwindling of love and affection that was once shared in the house the narrator passes by.