Self-Reliance In Ralph Emerson’s essay, “Self-Reliance”, he discusses how individuality leads to greatness, and how greatness leads to success. By applying metaphors, parallelism, and anaphoras, Emerson creates the idea of such ways. On multiple occasions throughout his essay, examples can easily be pulled as representations. Using various metaphors, Emerson helps get his point across to the reader. Emerson informs the reader that “envy is ignorance” and “imitation is suicide” (Emerson 2). He is convincing the audience just how important and serious it is to be your own individual person, without the impact of society and its dreadful ways. Additionally, a metaphor Emerson uses is “every heart vibrates to that iron string” (Emerson 3). It