Figurative Language In Einstein's Dreams, By Alan Lightman

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The authors of most, if not all, pieces of writing include examples of figurative language. The reader of Einstein’s Dreams, by Alan Lightman, is able to easily identify several uses of figurative language. Lightman describes several different worlds in his novel. Each world he described is different from one another by the way time is considered, and how each variation of time affects people. As a reader, many of the worlds and their concepts of time may be difficult to comprehend, but some may find that Lightman’s use of figurative language makes the book as a whole easier to understand. Lightman elevates the content of his novel, Einstein’s Dreams, through the use of similes, personification, and metaphors. One of the many types of figurative language used by Lightman are similes. Some …show more content…
Here, the author is comparing the pain of a headache to the pain of a root canal without laughing gas. The author is trying to get the reader to understand how much pain the person feels because of their headache. He /She uses a root canal without laughing gas to describe the pain endured by a headache because many people know how painful a root canal without laughing gas is. Lightman includes many examples of similes throughout the novel. He states, “The first is as rigid and metallic as a massive pendulum of iron that swings back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. The second squirms and wriggles like a bluefish in a bay” (Lightman 18). Lightman is talking about two different types of time; mechanical time and body time. He compares mechanical time to a swinging iron pendulum and he compares body time to a moving fish. A swinging iron pendulum is like mechanical time because it is very consistent in how it always swings the same way and it repeats what it did in the past. A moving fish is like body time because it is impulsive and does

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