Thursday, 21 August 2014

Please present the literary device used in part 3 of A Christmas Carol.

In the
following passage, Dickens uses both and
to express a joyous mood for Christmas present. Simile is a
comparison using the words like or as, while personification is giving human traits to inanimate
objects or animals:

There were great, round, pot-bellied
baskets of chestnuts, shaped like the waistcoats of jolly old gentlemen, lolling at the doors,
and tumbling out into the street in their apoplectic opulence. There were ruddy, brown-faced,
broad-girthed Spanish Onions, shining in the fatness of their growth like Spanish Friars, and
winking from their shelves in wanton slyness at the girls as they went by ...


The baskets of chestnuts are, in a simile, said to be like the
waistcoasts (vests) of jolly old gentleman who are heavy around the middle. The onions are
personified as Spanish friars (clergyman) and are pictured winking slyly at the passing girls,
as if flirting with them as a human would. The passage also uses , which is description
employing any of the fives senses of sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch. We can see the great
bounty of chestnuts and onions in the shop, all of which give off a dominant impression of jolly
good cheer.

In the passage below, we meet up with imagery again. As in the
quote above, we can picture the great bounty of food that Dickens uses to characterize Christmas
Day:

Heaped up on the floor, to form a kind of throne,
were turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, sucking-pigs, long wreaths of
sausages, mince-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked
apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch, that
made the chamber dim with their delicious steam.

The
specific details of what is thereturkeys, mince pies, etc.rather than a vague description of
"a lot of wonderful food" makes the scene come alive for us.

The
narrator uses , which is putting opposites together (in this case a
baby and a rhino), to describe how broadly immune Scrooge feels from shock:


nothing between a baby and rhinoceros would have astonished him very
much

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