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Brooks Heintzelman [email protected] Some examples of authors who use metaphor in their own personal narratives: Dave Eggers, from his memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: “But when she went in again, and they had ‘opened her up’—a phrase they used—and had looked inside, it was staring out at them, at the doctors, a thousand writhing worms under a rock, swarming, shimmering, wet and oily—Good God!—or maybe not worms but a million little podules, each a tiny city of cancer, each with an unruly, sprawling, environmentally careless citizenry with no zoning laws whatsoever.” Jamaica Kincaid, from her essay, “On Seeing England for the First Time”: “When I saw England for the first time, I was a child in school sitting at a desk. The England I was looking at was laid out on a map gently, beautifully, delicately, a very special jewel; it lay on a bed of sky blue—the background of the map—its yellow form mysterious, because though it looked like a leg of mutton, it could not really look like anything so familiar as a leg of mutton because it was England—with shadings of pink and green, unlike any shadings of pink and green I had seen before, squiggly veins of red running in every direction. England was a special jewel all right, and only special people got to wear it. The people who got to wear England were English people.”

Metaphor in Personal Narrative

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Brooks Heintzelman [email protected]

Some examples of authors who use metaphor in their own personal narratives:

Dave Eggers, from his memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius:

“But when she went in again, and they had ‘opened her up’—a phrase they used—and had looked inside, it was staring out at them, at the doctors, a thousand writhing worms under a rock, swarming, shimmering, wet and oily—Good God!—or maybe not worms but a million little podules, each a tiny city of cancer, each with an unruly, sprawling, environmentally careless citizenry with no zoning laws whatsoever.”

Jamaica Kincaid, from her essay, “On Seeing England for the First Time”:

“When I saw England for the first time, I was a child in school sitting at a desk. The England I was looking at was laid out on a map gently, beautifully, delicately, a very special jewel; it lay on a bed of sky blue—the background of the map—its yellow form mysterious, because though it looked like a leg of mutton, it could not really look like anything so familiar as a leg of muttonbecause it was England—with shadings of pink and green, unlike any shadings of pink and green I had seen before, squiggly veins of red running in every direction. England was a special jewel all right, and only special people got to wear it. The people who got to wear England were English people.”

Joan Didion, from her essay, “Why I Write”:

“For reasons which now sound baroque I needed a degree by the end of that summer, and the English department finally agreed, if I would come down from Sacramento every Friday and talk about the cosmology of "Paradise Lost," to certify me proficient in Milton. I did this. Some Fridays I took the Greyhound bus, other Fridays I caught the Southern Pacific’s City of San Francisco on the last leg of its transcontinental trip… I can still recall the exact rancidity of the butter in the City of San Francisco’s dining car, and the way the tinted windows on the Greyhound bus cast the oil refineries around Carquinez Straits into a grayed and obscurely sinister light. In short, my attention was always on the periphery, on what I could see and taste and touch, on the butter, and the Greyhound bus. During those years I was traveling on what I knew to be a very shaky passport, forged papers: I knew that I was no legitimate resident in any world of ideas. I knew I couldn’t think. All I knew then was what I couldn’t do. All I knew was what I wasn’t, and it took me some years to discover what I was.

Which was a writer.”