Chapter 6 - Exercise 4

Analyzing and Interpreting Figurative Language

Analyze the figures of speech in the following passages. First, determine whether the figure of speech is a simile, a metaphor, or personification. Then explain the comparison. The answers for the first three are provided for you.

1. Disappointment and fear stuck like fishbones in her throat. (Ruthanne Lum McCunn, Thousand Pieces of Gold)
2. Summer fogs are common on the Oregon Coast; inland heat waves drag them from the Pacific as a man with a fever pulls the blanket to his chin. (David James Duncan, The River Why)
3. The writer is describing a river in India: The river itself made no sound, though it moved powerfully, eddying like a swarm of greasy snakes in the ravine. (Paul Theroux, To the Ends of the Earth)

1. Simile. Disappointment and fear are compared to fishbones caught in the character's throat. When a fishbone sticks in the throat, it both causes pain and is often difficult to get rid of. The character's feelings were persistent; she was constantly aware of them.
   
2. Metaphor. Summer fogs are compared to a blanket covering a feverish patient. Coastal fog blankets the landscape, providing a protective covering.
   
3. Simile. The swirling water in the river is compared to greasy snakes. This visual figure of speech suggests that the water is also dirty and polluted. It's important to know the meaning of the word "eddying," which means forming a small whirlpool, similar to the writhing motion a bunch of snakes would produce.

1		At every pass up and down the length of the Cascades [a mountain range in Oregon], on every ridge where the pines stand up like the bristles of a toothbrush, is a border: the soil changes, the trees and rocks change, the sky and the temperature and the light change. The transition is both reliable and abrupt. (Sallie Tisdale, Stepping Westward)
2		Mr. Taylor was Papa's new friend for Lesterville. He was a dried, sandy little man with a long, pointed nose like a rat's, a feature that seemed to fascinate him as much as it did other people, for he was always tugging at it, then squinting down to see if any change had come over it. Between these diversions he wrinkled it into a perpetual sniff, accompanied by rapid blinking of his small raisin eyes. He sniffed at words and people as if his nostrils did the work of all other senses, and he could sniff out a thought or even a person's financial status quicker than a beagle could smell a fox. (Dawn Powell, My Home is Far Away)
3		I began to walk down an empty avenue. All the streets I followed were downhill, as if to keep thrusting me farther toward the heard of this opaque megalopolis. The few cars that passed me looked as if they were fleeing from it at top speed, driving straight ahead. (As I walked past him, a tramp stirred in his carapace of cardboard boxes.) (Andrew Machine, Dreams of My Russian Summers)
4		The writer served in the Marine Corps in Vietnam: It was noon, without a breath of wind, and the sky seemed like a blazing aluminum lid clamped over the world. (Philip Caputo, A Rumor of War)
5		Like a frog at the bottom of a well, she had seen nothing beyond the small circle of blue sky that meant freedom, concentrating all her thoughts, all her energies toward piling up the gold she needed to reach it, never once considering it might be gained another way. (Ruthanne Lum McCunn, Thousand Pieces of Gold)
6		At a time when everyone's mind is on the explosions of the moment, it might seem obtuse of me to discuss the fourteenth century. But I think a backward look at that disordered, violent, bewildered, disintegrating, and calamity-prone age can be consoling and possibly instructive in a time of similar disarray. Reflected in a six-hundred-year-old mirror, a more revealing image of ourselves and our species might be seen than is visible in the clutter of circumstances under our noses. (Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century)
7		There is no way to measure the absolute amount of biological diversity vanishing year by year in rain forests around the world, as opposed to percentage losses, even in groups as well known as the birds. Nevertheless, to give an idea of the dimension of the hemorrhaging, let me provide the most conservative estimate that can be reasonably based on our current knowledge of the extinction process. (Edwin O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life)
8		"Death, it seems," Garp wrote, "does not like to wait until we are prepared for it. Death is indulgent and enjoys, when it can, a flair for the dramatic." (John Irving, The World According to Garp)
9		They [the two Civil War generals, Grant and Lee] were two strong men, these oddly different generals, and they represented the strengths of two conflicting currents that through them, had come into final collision. (Bruce Catton, "Grant and Lee")
10		Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen house. (George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language) In this following excerpt, underline all of the figures of speech and analyze them separately.
11		Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity. (Martin Luther King, Jr., "Letter from Birmingham Jail")