Sherman Alexie's Views On Figurative Language

1. The line “We lived on a combination of irregular paychecks, hope, fear, and government surplus food” is a hyperbole and zeugma. The word that creates the zeugma is the word lived, as the narrator uses the word lived to mean different things in the same context. The narrator actually lived off of paychecks and government food, but did not literally live off of hope and fear like the line suggests. The line is also a hyperbole because the author did not literally live off of the hope and fear, as you cannot sustain yourself with emotions. The effect of the figurative language is that the reader can tell how prevalent the hope and fear was, it was as real and as much as the physical money and food. This also creates an emotional effect, as the audience can relate to the hard times that Alexie faced.

Alexie’s analogy of a paragraph to a fence creates a new importance of the paragraph distinguishes, and gives deeper insight to the author’s childhood and views. The author states how important he views a paragraph to be, which tells the reader that the distinctions between paragraphs is important. This also allows the reader to see how the narrator views the world. Fences can keep people in and protect people, but they also keep new ideas out. The author describes the reservation as paragraph, simultaneously calling it a fence. The reservation and the Indians there did not adapt the ideas of outside, like reading. By comparing it to a fence, the narrator shows that the Indians remained separate, even though they were all part of the same country, or paragraph, so to