“When we reached Horsehead Landing, lightning was playing across half the sky and thunder roared out, hiding even the sound of the sea. The sun disappeared and darkness descended, almost like night. Flocks of marsh crows flew by, heading inland to their roosting trees; and two egrets, squawking, arose from the oyster-rock shallows and careened away. Doodle was both tired and frightened, and when he stepped from the skiff he collapsed onto the mud, sending an armada of fiddler crabs rustling off into the marsh grass”(10).
James Hurst uses personification, foreshadowing, and diction to express a serious, grim mood.
Personification is used to give character and spirit to the different weather elements in the story. Hurst uses words like “playing” and “roaring” to describe lightning and thunder in a storm, making it sound chaotic. According to his representation of how the lightning moved through the sky, the narrator and Doodle didn’t think that the lightning was frightening when they first saw it. Another verb that is used to add on to the feeling of chaos is “hiding”, as the thunder does to the sounds of the ocean, since in order to completely conceal something a sound would have to be extremely loud.
Hurst begins to include foreshadowing in the passage, as he says that “darkness descended, almost like night”.
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Other words could have made Doodle’s fall sound like a mere accident that could happen to anyone, but by using “collapsed”, the author obviously shows that he fell because of his own weakness. Hurst also describes the group of fiddler crabs scuttling about as an “armada”. This contributes to the darkness of the passage because it shows the crabs in a war-like positioning. Usually, troops in a war are made extremely cautionary of mistakes before a coming storm, and the crabs may be preparing themselves for Doodle’s