Main Literacy Devices- metaphor

 Literacy devices.

    This book’s author Michael Ondaatje is highly rated as a poet, so of course the language is unbelievably sensual and the story is like nothing I’ve ever read. Someone said of it as: “This book is a slow moving dream-- like a great, surrounding poem. ” It is full of emotion and description.

    There are lots of metaphor and in this book. Here is a great example:

“The desert could not be claimed or owned—it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names before Canterbury existed, long before battles and treaties quilted Europe and the East…. All of us, even those with European homes and children in the distance, wished to remove the clothing of our countries. It was a place of faith. We disappeared into landscape.”

    This paragraph is narrated by the English patient when he is thinking about the desert. He sees the desert as “a piece of cloth carried by winds” and “never held down by stones”. This indicates his passion and love for desert. In his eye, desert represents no restrictions; they are free to go anywhere they want, even the hard stones cannot hold them. As a person who longs for freedom, he loves the thing with uninhibited character. Furthermore, to Almasy, it has huge power not only to erase individual’s identity, but to transcend time. In the desert, he feels more connected to the ancient people who came before him than anywhere else in the world.

     In addition, the desert plays an important role in the book, not only as a background but also as a meaningful entity in itself. “Open, barren, and empty, the blank geography of the desert highlights the foolishness of war between nations." In the desert, Almasy notes, "all of us…wished to remove the clothing of our countries." When men are up against such a harsh enemy as the vast nature of the desert, the different ethnicities among them become meaningless. Living in the desert helps Almasy to realize this, and thus shape his own view of the world.

    Like the mentioned example, metaphor are applied frequently in the book to give more significance to the terms instead of dry scenery description.