Figurative Language In A Costly Treasure

Improved Essays
The author uses figurative language to contribute to the tension in “A Costly Treasure” by describing the figurative language. She is describing it to let you know what she is seeing. The author uses figurative language to contribute to the tension in A Costly Treasure for example, the passage stated that a rock “looked like someone’s petrified brain.”
This is figurative language because a rock can’t actually be a petrified brain. This is also figurative language because the author was using like in the sentence.

Another example of how the author used figurative language is “As if the desert stood dead in its tracks with fear when it saw the water” This is an example of figurative language because the desert can’t stop dead iits tracks

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    In “The Custom House” Nathaniel Hawthorne uses figurative language and negative diction to potray the US government in a negative light after losing his job at the customs house. Hawthrne compares the government to the national bird, the bald eagle. He describes the eagle as a “unhappy fowl,she appears, by the fierceness of her beak and eye” who “..has no great tenderness, even in her best of moods.” Hawthorne potrays the government as unhappy and rather mean with no kindness in it. She attacks those who sit under her for protection despite her vixenly looks and their itrustion onto her premises.…

    • 263 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In this specific passage, the narrator finds himself in a hole, surrounded by darkness. He is finally separate from all other driving forces that have affected him up to this point in his search for an identity, which would include the people he has encountered and the communities he has immersed himself in. By emphasizing impact through symbolism, irony, and vivid imagery within the narrator’s dream, Ralph Ellison is able to convey the critical importance of this section of the story. The event which precedes the narrator’s dream is searching for paper to make a torch in the darkness of a hole.…

    • 753 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In the great Gatsby Chapter 3 page 39 F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote this excerpt to show how different he was from everyone else and stands alone since he does not drink, or dance he just watches. In chapter 3 of The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald utilizes imagery and simile to illustrate more detail and emphasis in everything. The first type of figurative language noticed was a simile, On page 39, it states, ”in his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths…” him stating this is saying that the guest that came to the party just came and left but didn’t stay and probably didn’t know him. Another simile found on page 39, states, “while in his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug…” means that the station wagon becomes the…

    • 293 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Analysis Essay Can you imagine living in a time when you were judged and treated differently due to your skin color? In If Beale Street Could Talk,the author, James Baldwin, addresses this issue. The book is a mixture of a love story and the issue of racism , injustice, and prejudices. The book takes place in New York, from the viewpoint of a young black women, Tish, who is deeply in love with a young artists, Fonny, who has been arrested for a crime he has not committed. When it is discovered that Tish is pregnant, the families are supportive of the couple along with the drive to get Fonny out of jail.…

    • 887 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Throughout the excerpt Rebecca, the narrator is recounting a dream she had about a place that is dear to her, which is called Manderley. While reading the excerpt the reader will come across a variation of moods. In the beginning one will come across a mood of mystery. Eventually, as the reader continues on throughout the passage the atmosphere starts to become nightmarish and very eerie. Subsequently, as the reader nears the end of the passage they will start to get a feeling of nostalgia created by the passage.…

    • 1327 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Erik Larson is argued to have a difficult time creating realistic details for a book about a time period he could only research about. In The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson uses brilliantly constructed figurative language in order to insightfully display his interpretation of the story (entailing the events of the Chicago World Fair and the serial killer H. H. Holmes) and realistically and informatively describe the details of people, places, and events in the novel. The first figurative language tool that will be addressed is the simile. The first simile that is used to describe one of the main "characters" of Larson’s novel, Holmes, is “As he moved through the station, the glances of young women fell around him like wind-blown petals”…

    • 947 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    There is an abundance of figurative language in Night, written by Elie Wiesel. He uses a lot of very complicated figurative language to express certain images or feelings, often making his words like a puzzle that one needs to solve in order to understand its meaning. There are three particularly meaningful uses of figurative language throughout the novel, and that show Elie Wiesel’s creativity and amazing writing skill. The first use of figurative language that really stood out to me was when Elie Wiesel used a metaphor to compare the situation in which the Jews were to a sword hanging over their heads.…

    • 800 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Irony is the use of language to signify the opposite of one’s meaning, usually to emphasize meaning or create humor. In the novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, the author, Mark Haddon, uses irony to convey the mentality of Christopher, a child with Asperger's syndrome, and give the reader a deeper understanding of him and his disorder. The format of the book and genre were specifically chosen by the author to give the reader an initial idea of how Christopher is different. Distressing settings are also used to further differentiate Christopher from the reader.…

    • 1232 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Superior Essays

    He has used imagery to allow the reader envision what he saw. The sensory detail makes the reader “lose themselves” in the story as if it were real, something that can only be accomplished when being fictionalized. The figurative language expresses emotions. Words can only classify emotions. However they are unfathomable and can only be expressed through “exaggerations”.…

    • 1344 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The right words The stone lion (Wild and Voutila, 2014) begins and ends with the lion being a statue in front of the library. The journey taken through the beginning and the end of the story allow the readers to feel, dream, imagine and think about feelings of the lion and the feelings that he encounters. Margaret Wild and Rita Voutila allow the readers to embark on the same journey through the use of emotive language and pictures throughout the story. Humans are able to gain the information though the use of their senses, sight and sound (Tunnell, 2008).…

    • 1027 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Another great use of metaphor is when Pankhurst says, “You cannot rouse a Britisher unless you touch his pocket. What that means is that no change can be made unless an effort is made to cause them. The big picture lies within a metaphor it just says it in a different way. It makes the audience perceive the information being relayed in a different, more positive way. The use of a metaphor within Pankhursts speech helps to make it as persuasive and relevant as it…

    • 975 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    From its opening account of his birth to its closing pages depicting his new-found freedom, Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself is characterized in part by its strikingly fluid, refined, and effective prose style. Despite his masterful control of language a paradoxical problem seems to subtly haunt Douglass's Narrative: the text's memorable prose is perhaps ironically too good. As an ex-slave autobiographer, Douglass was traveling a road already well-worn by the accepted conventions of his day for both autobiographies and slave narratives.…

    • 1479 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Figurative language is the use of words in a non-literal sense. One example of figurative language is simile; a simile is a comparison of two unlike things using like or as to give an added meaning to one of them. The next quote has one form of simile. “In his blue gardens, men and women came and went like moths among the whispering and the champagne and the stars” (39). In this simile Fitzgerald uses like to compare the men and women to the moths that float through the garden at night at Gatsby’s party.…

    • 1377 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Thesis and Outline of Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley Diana Greene Liberty University Thesis Thesis statement: Percy Shelley’s sonnet is somewhat of a twist of the traditional form. Shelley use the pronoun “I”, the first person poetic persona, at the beginning of the sonnet and then he cleverly moves the focus to the third person, “a traveler”, of whose words are incorporated through the last lines of the poem. The mention of a traveler in the poem promises an exciting story to be told.…

    • 1181 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Metaphors are figures of speech that bring comparison or analogies between two things that are considered to lack similarity. It brings in the visual description of what is being described. For instance in Sylvia Path’s poem “Metaphors”, the writer brings out the visual description of a pregnant woman using an elephant. The size of a pregnant woman is huge hence the comparison with an elephant which is also huge though a woman and an elephant are different in many ways like an elephant is an animal with a trunk but a woman is a human being with no trunk. Susan Glaspell’s use of the word Trifles as a metaphor contributes to and illustrates theme, tone and characterization in the play in the approach described below.…

    • 1074 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays