Tuesday, January 29, 2013

From chapter 11 of To Kill a Mockingbird, please provide examples of imagery, personification, metaphor and dialect.

Chapter 11 discusses the Mrs. Dubose saga, which brings with it many opportunities to find examples in the text for imagery, metaphors, and dialect because it is full of verbal and physical drama. First, Mrs. Dubose likes to holler rude and crude things from her porch at Jem and Scout. This creates most of the drama. "Jem was scarlet" (102) is an example of a metaphor about how he reacts to Mrs. Dubose calling his father insulting names. Jem perpetuates the drama by chopping off the tops of her camellia bushes. The description of Atticus coming home after finding out what Jem had done that day includes images that have to do with the senses of sight and sound, as follows:



"Two geological ages later, we heard the soles of Atticus's shoes scrape the front steps. The screen door slammed, there was a pause--Atticus was at the hat rack in the hall--and we heard him call, 'Jem!' His voice was like the winter wind" (103).



Scout uses the words "scrape," "slammed" and "wind" to describe the sounds associated with how a father comes home after learning upsetting news about his son's behavior that day. She also adds a cold simile--"like the winter wind"--to accentuate what the atmosphere felt like when Jem was called to his father's attention.



Dialect has to do with the way people from a specific geographical area speak. For the South in the 1930s, for example, people didn't think twice before using the N-word in any form--politely or disrespectfully. Mrs. Dubose is a great example because she has no filter with that word at all. She's also not shy to use it when referring to the children's father, Atticus. Other trends in dialect can be seen when characters talk to each other in informal settings. For example, when some people in Maycomb talk casually to each other, they drop the last letters of their words. Lee places apostrophes where sounds of letters are dropped from certain words, such as "an'" for the word "and," "goin'" for the word "going," and then some words are changed completely like "ain't" for "isn't. This also helps the reader to detect the southern accent normally associated with people from the southern states.

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