The Year of Silence by Kevin Brockmeier is about how a city goes ridiculously silent. Some people were so affected by the silence that they changed their whole way of life. Over time the majority of the residents start to realize that the silence brought a new meaning to their life and a sense of peace falls over the city. This story shows how people take things for granted until it is no longer there through, cause and effect, the structure of the story, and figurative language.
The definition of cause and effect as is described by the Oxford English Dictionary means,” noting a relationship between actions or events such that one or more are the result of the other or others”. This basically means that if you achieve an action then consequences good or bad will follow after. In the Year of Silence cause and effect is
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In the story it uses simile to describe the silence. In the story it says,” and the silence passed, through him like wave (pg23)”. This quote is comparing the silence to waves using the word like making it a simile. Another use of figurative language used in the story is again a simile. In the story it says,”Becoming as useless as pigeons, virtually impossible to provoke to violence( pg25)”. This quote is comparing the people after the silence to useless pigeons with the word as. The final use of figurative language in the story is personification. In the text it says,” When the roads fell silent and pleased when the elevators stopped crying out of their cables, but by the time the cell phones and the pagers ceased to chirp, we were faced with a problem of diminishing returns(pg27)”. This is an example of personification because elevators can become silent unless it spoke, and pagers can't chirp. Personification means giving human qualities to inanimate objects, and that exactly what this quote is