The two literary devices that are most effective in Amy Tan’s essay are personification and simile. Both personification are used to help the reader better understand Tan’s feelings in the essay. Personification is used to show Tan’s feelings without having them directly stated. One example of Tan showing her feelings though personification is when she personifies the doorbell. “And then they arrived- the minister’s family and all of my relatives in a clamor of doorbells and rumpled Christmas presents”(Tan Paragraph 4). Tan personifies the doorbell as the guests arrive at her house. The word clamor brings to mind a large group of people who are all frantically moving around. This would suggest that Tan sees the guests as a mob of people who
