Lesson 3
 Figurative
language is the inclusive term
for words that are used in ways that
depart conspicuously from their literal
meanings in order to achieve special
meanings or effects.
 Figurative language is used most often in
poetry, but it is essential to all literary
genres and discourse.
 There are two main classes of figurative
language: figures of thought and figures
of speech
 Figures
of thought are also called
tropes.
 Trope comes from the Greek word
meaning “a turn”
 They are words or phrases used in ways
that effect an obvious change (or “turn) in
their standard meaning.
 One
kind of trope depends on a
comparison between two very different
objects, or else on a transference of
qualities associated with an object,
experience, or concept to another not
literally connected with it.
 These include simile, metaphor,
personification, pathetic fallacy,
synecdoche, and metonymy.
 Another
kind of trope depends on a
contrast between two levels of meaning,
or a shift from one level of meaning to
another.
 Irony is the most prominent example of
this types.
 Others include: paradox, oxymoron,
understatement, litotes, hyperbole, and
periphrasis.
A simile is a figure of thought in which one kind of
thing is compared to a markedly different object,
concept, or experience
 The comparison is made explicit by the word “like”
or “as”:

• Jen’s room is like a pig sty.
• Jen’s room is as dirty as a pig sty.

The tone of a simile may be exalted:
• “O, my luve’s like a red, red rose.”

The tone may be wry or scornful:
• His head was large, globular and oily;…and his large hat, set
upon it sideways, looked like a bulb which had grown out of
another.

The tone may indicate heartbreak:
• “Death lies on her like an untimely frost/Upon the sweetest
flower of all the field.”
 In
a metaphor, a word or phrase that in
literal use designates one kind of thing is
applied to a conspicuously different object,
concept, or experience, without asserting an
explicit comparison.
• Jen’s room is a pig sty.
 Instead
of simply putting the differing
objects side by side (as in a simile), the
items actually become superimposed on
each other.
 Metaphors can be markedly more complex
than similes.
“But soft, what light from yonder window
breaks?/It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.”
 A metaphor may be short or long, a quick linking
or a series of sustained comparisons.
 On the simplest level, it is as concise as a single
word.

• I “wilted”; her heart “sang”; “leaden” thoughts; a heart of
“gold”; calling someone an “angel” or a “dragon”

Sometimes a speaker elaborates on a metaphor
to explain its relevance, as in Hamlet when
Horatio describes the effect of the ghost’s
appearance on his nerves:
• “It harrows me with fear and wonder.”
 The key here lies in the word “harrow”, which means to break
up soil with a sharp, heavy instrument.
A
mixed metaphor occurs when two or
more linked images clash:
• “She felt a heavy burden of guilt, but she would not
let it engulf her resolve.”
 The image of being weighed down is confused by the
conflicting image of being surrounded and swallowed up,
drowned.
 The solution would be to reword the phrase to make it
more clear:
 “She felt a heavy burden of guilt, but she would not let it hinder
her resolve.”
 Mixed
metaphors often occur because the
writer is not thinking clearly, and it can
make a statements seem ludicrous.
Mixed metaphors are also used to suggest that a
speaker is so carried away by powerful feelings
as to be heedless of the mixed messages.
 In Hamlet, when Ophelia is distraught over what
she believes is Hamlet’s sudden plunge into
madness, she contrasts her bereft state with the
delight of having “sucked the honey of his music
vows.”
 The reference to tasting that sweet honey clashes
with that of delighting in the musicality of
Hamlet’s professions of love, but both express
eloquently the young woman’s despair over an
incalculable loss of something rare and precious.

An extended metaphor is sustained through
several lines.
 In Hamlet, Polonius tends to elaborate on many
points and is quite wordy. In the following
example he warns his daughter, Ophelia, not to
trust the seductive lies of young men who are
“burning” with passion:

• I do know
When the blood burns, how prodigal the soul
lends the tongue to vows. These blazes, daughter,
giving more light than heat, extinct in both
even in their promise, as it is a-making,
you must not take for fire.
 Polonius
is saying that the momentary
“blazes”—fervent declarations of
aroused suitors hoping to seduce gullible
maidens—should not be mistake for
“true fire”—trustworthy and lasting vows.
 Personification
is a figure of thought (or
trope) in which an abstract concept,
animal, or inanimate object is treated as
though it were alive or had human
attributes.
 “She
dwells with Beauty—Beauty that
must die;/And Joy, whose hand is ever at
his lips/Bidding adieu.”
----Keats
 In
Romeo and Juliet, Lord Capulet uses
personification to express his despair at
finding Juliet supposedly dead on the
morning of her wedding day:
• Death is my son-in-law, Death is my heir;/My
daughter he has wedded.”
 The
grim representation of Death as both
his daughter’s bridegroom and his own
prospective heir conveys the morbid turn of
mind of the old father as well as the empty
future he envisions now that he has lost his
only child.

A different use of the trope occurs in Charlotte
Bronte’s Jane Eyre when the heroine agonizes
over her decision to refuse Mr. Rochester’s
proposal to run off with him:
• “Conscience and Reason turned traitors against me and
charged me with crime in resisting him.”
The dilemma is that Jane has just discovered that
her beloved is already married, but to a long
demented wife whom he cannot legally divorce.
 She is torn by the conflict between standing on
moral principles and offering succor to the man
she loves.

 An
extended form of personification can
occur in allegory, in which an abstract
concept is presented as though it were a
character who speaks and acts as an
independent being.
 In
the medieval morality play Everyman, the
personified characters include not only the
hero, Everyman, who represents all human
beings as they face death and final
judgment, but also such abstract qualities as
Beauty, Knowledge, and Good Deeds.
 The play depicts the extent to which each of
these abstractions is able and willing to
accompany Everyman on his terrifying final
journey toward the grave and the divine
reward or punishment that awaits him
beyond it.
 Edmund
Spenser’s The Faerie Queen
 John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress
 Jonathan Swifts Gulliver’s Travels
 George Orwell’s Animal Farm
 Pathetic
fallacy is a special type of
personification, in which inanimate
aspects of nature, such as the landscape
or the weather, are represented as having
human qualities or feelings.
 The term derives from the logical
absurdity (fallacy) of supposing that
nature can sympathize with (feel pathos
for) human moods and concerns.
 Pathetic
fallacy once was considered a
derogatory term because it showed false
or “morbid” feelings.
 It no longer has that negative connotation
and is now merely descriptive.
 Usually the pathetic fallacy reflects or
foreshadows some aspect of the poem or
narrative at that point, such as the plot,
theme, or characterization, and so
intensifies the tone.
A
mild, sunny day would promise a tranquil,
happy scene.
 It is no accident that the dire events in
Hamlet begin with the ghost’s appearance
on a winter midnight.
 James Joyce has his young narrator in
“Araby” allude to this trope when he
anticipates the failure of his futile romantic
quest:
• “The air was pitilessly raw and already my heart
misgave me.”
 Pathetic
fallacy can also be used ironically.
 The bloody battle of Chancellorville in
Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage
is set on a lovely summer day.
 On the eve of the battle, the naïve young
private Henry Fleming sees nature attuned
to his need for consolation:
• “There was a caress in the soft winds; and the whole
mood of the darkness, he thought, was one of
sympathy for himself and his distress.”
A change in the mood of the weather or the look
of the landscape is a favorite means for authors
to signal a shift in the fortunes of characters.
 As Henry encounters the devastation of war, the
setting accordingly turns dark and threatening.
 After the battle is over, Henry is able “to turn with
a lover’s thirst to images of tranquil skies, fresh
meadows, cool brooks—an existence of soft and
eternal peace.”
 The weather reflects his newly optimistic mood
as “a golden ray of sun [comes] through the hosts
of leaden rain clouds.”

 Synecdoche
derived from the Greek
word for “to take up together.”
 It is a figure of thought in which the term
for part of something is used to represent
the whole.
 Less commonly, the whole can be used to
represent a part.
A
fleet of ships may be described as
“forty sails.”
 Athletes have been nicknamed
“Muscles.”
 Manual laborers called “blue collar”
workers.
 The food needed for sustenance “daily
bread”.
 It is closely related to metonymy.
 Metonymy
is a trope which substitutes
the name of an entity with something else
that is closely associated with it.
 “The
throne” is a metonymic synonym for
“the king”
 “Shakespeare” for the works of the
playwright
 “the Kremlin” for the ruling body of
modern Russia
 “England” or “old Norway” as the
designation for the king of the country.
 The name derives from Greek roots that
mean “changing a name.”
The mingling of synecdoche and metonymy has
been used for ironic effect.
 The distraught Ophelia, in shock over Hamlet’s
malicious tirade, says about her heretofore gentle
lover:

• “The courtier’s, the soldier’s, scholar’s, eye, tongue,
sword…Th’observed of all observers, quite, quite down.”
Here the order of Ophelia’s list goes against logic,
associating the courtier with the eye, the soldier with
the tongue, and the scholar with the sword.
 “eye” and “tongue” represent the whole man by
means of parts, and so are synecdoches.
 “sword,” which expresses the close association
between the soldier and his weapon, is a metonymy.

 Irony
is the broadest class of figures of
thought that depend on presenting a
deliberate contrast between two levels of
meaning.
 The word is derived from a type of
character in Greek drama, the eiron, who
pretended to be stupid and unaware.
• He used that pretense to deceive and triumph
over another stock character, the alazon, who
was truly stupid, but boastful and complacent.
 There
are five types of irony:
• Verbal
• Structural
• Dramatic
• Tragic
• Cosmic
 Verbal
Irony:
• Consists of implying meaning different from, and
often the complete opposite of, the one that is
explicitly stated.
• Usually the irony is signaled by clues in the
context of the situation or in the style of
expression.
 In
Robert Frost’s “Provide, Provide,” the
speaker laments the transience of earthly
fame and power. He advises:
• “Die early, and avoid the fate.”
 The
irony is implied by the contrast
between the mock sagacity of the tone
and the cold comfort of the drastic socalled solution.
 In
more complex cases of verbal irony, the
detection of the irony may depend on
values that the author assumes are shared
by his or her audience.
 “A Modest Proposal”
• Presents a happy solution to the famine in the
author’s native Ireland: using the infants of the
starving lower classes as a source of food.
• The author is continually cool and rational: the
reaction of horror is left to the reader.
• The risk is that an oblivious audience will mistake
irony for serious statement and will miss the
underlying meaning.
 Many
people use verbal irony and
sarcasm synonymously.
• Sarcasm is actually simpler and more crude
 In dialogue, it is often signaled by vocal inflection.
 Example:
 “I’m going to opium dens, dens of vice and criminals’
hangouts, Mother. I’ve joined the Hogan Gang, I’m a hired
assassin, I carry a tommy gun in the violin case!...They call
me Killer, Killer Wingfield, I’m leading a double-life, a
simple, honest warehouse worker by day, by night a
dynamic czar of the underworld, Mother.”
---Tennessee Williams
The Glass Menagerie
 Structural
irony refers to an implication of
alternate or reversed meaning that
pervades a work.
• A major technique involves the use of a naïve
protagonist or unreliable narrator who
continually interprets events and intentions in
ways that the author signals are mistaken.
 In
Mark Twain’s Huck Finn, Huck believes
at first that the rascally King and Duke are
the brave and noble men that they claim
to be, despite signs of their shady past.
 Other
narrators may be unreliable not
because they are gullible but because
they are mentally incapacitated.
• “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe
 The narrator is paranoid and hallucinatory.
 Another
way to create structural irony is to
relate the same events from the
perspectives of different narrators.
• The Sound and the Fury by Faulkner
 The novel’s narration shifts between two different time
periods and among three sons from the same dysfunctional
southern family.
 One narrator is mentally retarded, the second is suicidally
depressed, the third is a sadistic egoist consumed with
rage and scorn.
 The book concludes with an omniscient 3rd person
narrator.
 Creates a “jigsaw puzzle” effect
 Dramatic
irony occurs when the audience
is privy to knowledge that one or more of
the characters lacks.
 May be used for comic or tragic effects.
 In
Twelfth Night by Shakespeare, he lets us
in on the fact that Viola is disguised as a boy
in the first scene.
• This allows us to enjoy the humorous dramatic
 In
ironies that result when the Countess Olivia, the
object of the duke’s courtship, falls in love with Viola.
the Odyssey, Odysseus’s disguise as a
beggar provides dramatic irony as he
encounters family members and hated
rivals, but in order to get his revenge, he
must refrain from revealing his true identity.
 When
dramatic irony occurs in tragedies,
it is called tragic irony.
• Oedipus
• Romeo and Juliet
 Cosmic
irony refers to an implied
worldview in which characters are led to
embrace false hopes of aid or success,
only to be defeated by some larger force,
such as God or fate.
 In
Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman kills
himself to secure his family the insurance
payment that his suicide will, in fact,
make invalid.
 In Shakespeare’s King Lear, several
characters congratulate themselves on a
triumph or a narrow escape, only to be
destroyed shortly afterward
 Think—Final Destination
 The
establishment of complex, even
contradictory, attitudes toward experience,
and the interpretation of possible motives or
outcomes in more than one way, are major
sources of literature’s richness.
 Because life itself is full of contradictions
and unexpected turns, irony has long had a
special appeal to writers and readers.
 The ability to respond to irony in its myriad
forms is a sure sign of a reader’s astuteness.
 Basically, recognizing
look smart. 
irony makes you