Literary Response to Passage from The Story of My Life by Helen Keller Essay

Literary Response to Passage from The Story of My Life by Helen Keller - Essay ExampleIn literary works, however, where distinct perceptions, feelings and moods are to be conveyed alongside pure facts, analogies preserve be used to make the text more interesting, memorable and evocative for the reader. In this case the doctrine of similitude of the direct is a good example of how the author uses language to represent emotional as well as factual elements in her life story. The passage musical mode occurs on the first page of Chapter IV in the book, and relates the child Helen Kellers anticipation of meeting her teacher Anne Sullivan. It starts with a direct question to the reader devote you ever been at sea in a dense mottle and it aims to represent the loss of human senses and the feeling of helplessness that this brings. In English the confines at sea can be used literally, to mean undergoing a voyage on water, or figuratively, meaning that someone has lost his or her beari ngs, and is afloat(p) far from land. Since it is difficult to imagine being blind and deaf as an actual experience, the analogy of standing on a ship in fog serves to illustrate what it feels like. Inanimate objects like the ship, take on human characteristics the great ship, tense and anxious, groped her way Just as the ship has no way of cognize how near the harbor was so Helen Keller had no idea what was about to happen to her. The ship is personified here, and this encourages the reader to step into the role of a ship heading for harbor. It is abstemious that Helen Kellers imagination is doing its best to make up for the lack of sights and sounds to give clues to what is happening all around her. In the middle of the passage the author explains what the analogy of the ship means I was like that ship before my education began. By using this statement as a key to the text, the reader can figure out that the ship is Helen Keller, the harbor is the safety and security that she fo und in the teachings and loving care that her teacher brought her. A very interesting recrudesce of the analogy is found in the expression a tangible white darkness shut you in. This is an unusual expression because it makes reference to the human senses in an simply contradictory way. Darkness is not normally something that you can touch, and so the word tangible is out of place, and furthermore, the adjective white is not usually used to learn darkness. This collocation sounds wrong, because the whole point about darkness is that it is precisely not white. Helen Keller deliberately places these contradictory words together because she is trying to find a way of describing the phenomenon of being deaf and blind. By mixing the sense of touch with an unusual use of color, she is emphasizing the way that a deaf and blind person uses separate senses to imagine the way that the world is. This is a very inventive usage, and shows the authors literary skill. The point is further expan ded when she links the word settle with the word love in the phrase the light of love. The darkness she suffered as a child was also a spiritual one, and the analogy of a ship sailing into a harbour full of light conveys a sense of arrival to safety after a long spell of being white-lipped of the unknown. By addressing the reader directly, and using the ship analogy, Helen Keller depersonalizes her own suffering, but at the same time conveys the emotions she felt, and this is a very skilful use of the technique of analogy.