Helen Keller Metaphors

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Helen Keller was born on June 27th, 1880 and died June 1st, 1968. She was one of the most important people of her era. She accomplished much in literature and politics during her lifetime. The fact that she was able to do so much with her life is impressive enough for a normal person. She had to overcome some special challenges. She grew up being a woman in a predominantly man's world. It is even more impressive when you understand the fact that she became blind and deaf at the age of eighteen months old. Through the help of Anne Sullivan, Keller was able to learn much. The short story, “The Day Language Came into My Life,” is an excerpt from her autobiography, where she recalls her memories from when she first learned about language. …show more content…

She could have chosen so many other metaphors but she decided to choose a ship in a fog as her desolate life and light to be love and her salvation. We can learn a lot about what Keller is trying to convey by the metaphor that she chooses. To me, that fact that she compares herself to a ship lost in fog shows the reader that she was just floating along through life, without direction, love, joy and happiness and seemed to embrace feelings such as anger, fear, and bitterness of being lost. On the other side of her metaphor, the light is something that all ships lost in fog desire to see. The light will give the ship a sense of joy, happiness, excitement, pleasure, and a sense of love. The reader can assume that language came to mean everything to her. Not only did it change her life, but it also enhanced it immensely making her a better and happier person being able to communicate and express herself through …show more content…

She waits until after she describes the afternoon before she met her teacher. In that paragraph she describes how she stood on the porch dumb and expectant and how her fingers lingered unconsciously. Keller waits until after these details to bring up her metaphor because she wants her audience to get their own sense of her life before she gives them a solid metaphor that they can relate to. After Keller introduces her metaphor the readers get a clear picture of how her life was and how language had such a tremendous impact on her life. Her putting her metaphor here signals a changing point in the essay. At this point it turns from her world being dark and bitter to her opening up a whole new world full of happiness, joy, love and many other emotions through the use of