“The lightning bugs trapped in empty peanut butter jars with triangular holes on top, made with the point of a beer can opener. The fading smears of phosphorescent yellow-green where the older, more jaded kids have used their sneaker soles to smear the lights across the gray pavement. “Let them out,” our mothers would say, “or they will die in there.” Finally, perfect sleep. Sweaty sheets, no dreams.”
‘’The Monsters Due On Maple Street’’:This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we all call the a Twilight Zone. Fade in on a shot of the night sky. The various nebulae and plant bodies stand out and sharp,sparkling relief. And the camera begins a slow pan across the Heavens.”Boom”, the power goes out on the whole Maple Street.
It was useful for Alvarez to apply literary and rhetorical devices to enhance the appropriate understandings of her symbols, and foreshadowing in her novel. The four sisters were most known as “Las Mariposas”, which in the English language translates to Butterflies. “Even in the church during the privacy of the holy communion, Father Gabriel bent down and whispered “Viva la Mariposa”” (Alvarez 259). Butterflies are known for its beauty, freedom, and short term lives. Which all three known facts represents the Maribel sisters, they had the face of angels but strong and determined to fight against Trujillo and the regime.
“Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power.” -Patrick Rothfuss. Everyone in uses figurative language in someway, you could be writing a paper, yelling at your sister, or maybe just talking to yourself. But you use it in someway, shape, or form.
The passage “Cherry Bomb” by Maxine Clair is the recollection of the young adult narrator’s summer in the fifth grade. Clair set a youthful,jovial and carefree tone that depicts the narrator’s summer as innocent and filled with memories. Clair employs a variety of literary techniques ranging from informal and almost like child like diction to visual imagery and biblical references , in order to illustrate the youthful reality of the narrator’s summer. Clair clearly depicts the juvenileness of the narrator early in the passage with a statement like “life was measure in summers” which shows the immaturity of the narrator as they didn’t experience the day to day stresses of a normal adult. In the beginning of the passage Clair attempts to characterize the
Liliana Villa In this section of In the Time of the Butterflies, Julia Alvarez uses various literary elements specifically interior monologue, and figurative language to show how Mate discovers she is willing to sacrifice herself for the movement. Mate was taken by officers in hopes she could be used as persuasion towards Leonardo through torture. When Leonardo tells the officers to leave her out of it, the officers in turn beat Leonardo. Mate, being in shock, began screaming for them to stop, she claims “It felt like my very own stomach was being punched”, which shows at first Mate was only thinking about what was happening to her own life.
In Sue Monk Kidd’s novel, The Secret Life of Bees, Kidd incorporates the literary technique of allusion to assist the reader in delving into Lily’s thought process. Furthermore, to incorporate allusion, Kidd compares the message Lily interpreted from the arrival of the bees in her room to the plagues God sent to the pharaoh Ramesses. Lily ponders: Back in my room on the peach farm, when the bees had first come out at night, I had imagined they were sent as a special plague for T. Ray. God saying, Let my daughter go, and maybe that’s exactly what they’d been, a plague that released me (151).
One of the most important aspects of “grit lit” is the violence that occurs in almost every novel. The violence that reoccurs throughout all of the “grit lit” novels allows for a more exciting plot and character conflict throughout the novel. One of the most influential and famous southern writers is Harry Crews. Crews is responsible for many different novels, short stories, and autobiographies, and almost all of his works include some type of violence. The main reason for violence in southern literature is due to the unordinary, low-life characters that the author includes to allow for a violent plot.
The story “Blaxicans” was about a man name Richard Rodriguez the son of Mexican immigrants and was born in san Francisco in 1944. When Richard started school one of his teachers asked his parents to speak more English at home, and ricardo become Richard. Rodriguez points out that the term “Hispanic” describes a culture not a race, and that while there may be some tension between Black and Latino races, calling it a “war between blacks and Hispanics” is not valid because black is a race and Hispanic is a culture. Using his own personal experiences, he points out that our standards of multiculturalism based on Canada’s standards meaning we want things to be separate but equal. Which means, that English would still be our main language, however,
Some people feel unwanted, as if they don’t belong. Often they have just not found the right place to reside. Sue Monk Kidd, author of, “The Secret Life of Bees” which discusses a girl named Lily who grew up with her abusive father and the guilt of accidentally murdering her own mother. She never felt at home, especially because she hand many questions about her mother, Deborah. She ran away with her nanny, Rosaleen, in hopes of finding a place to call home.
Twain: In “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras Country” the tone of the narrator’s relationship began on the very first page. The narrator says that he has a “lurking suspicion” that Leonidas W. Smiley is made up and that Wheeler would “bore me to death with some exasperating reminiscence of him as long and as tedious as it should be useless to me” (Twain 1285). The narrator says that Simon Wheeler’s story telling is a “monotonous narrative” with no expressions (Twain 1285). Wheeler tells a Story about a man named Jim Smiley and uses figurative language to portray imagery throughout.
It is a warm summer night and shades of orange, red, and gold appear in the sky over the pine-covered hills. The sun soon disappears beneath the dark hills and darkness settles over the land. The buffalo, antelope, and elk find places to rest for the night and all is quiet except for the creeks and birds. In several hours, the sky will again be lit with a multitude of colors and the animals will begin to rise. A new day will begin in the Black Hills, just like it did hundreds of years ago.
This connection of the sun to the iguana almost gives the iguana a mystical aura, leaning into the poem’s fable-like quality and mood. This fable-like tone is further described in the prey that the Iguana eats. The anthill is described succinctly with one word, which was “monastic”, which means a monastery or monk-like quality. Not only does this word describe the ant-hill, the inanimate object the ants live in, which are full of cells and chambers like a monastery, but also describes the inhabitants inside the anthill.
In The Rattler the speaker’s rhetorical strategy is to use pathos to make the audience feel sympathy for his/her actions and to also use logos to give good reasons for his/her actions. The speaker is justified in killing the rattlesnake because he/she was protecting the lives of others while being courageous at the same time. In the third paragraph the author uses pathos when he/ she says: “But I reflected that there were children, dogs, horses at the ranch, as well as men and women like shod; my duty, plainly, was to the kill the snake.”
There was no chattering or chirping of birds; no growling of bears and no chuckling of contented otters; instead, the clearing lay desolate and still, as though it never wished to be turned into day. The only occupants were rodents and spiders who had set their home in the dank, forgotten shack. From its base, dead, brown grass reached out, all the way to the edge of the tree-line, unable to survive in the perished, infertile soil that made up the foundations of the house. Bird houses and feeders swung still from the once growing apple trees, in the back garden, consigned to a life of
