Literary Techniques In Tangerine By Edward Bloor

Imagine living your everyday life in a town named Tangerine, where natural disasters commonly occur. This is the situation that the protagonist, Paul Fisher, has been enduring ever since his family moved to Tangerine, Florida. The novel, Tangerine written by Edward Bloor, describes how Paul Fisher sees the world through his thick-rimmed goggles due to his damaged eyesight from “staring at an eclipse.” Paul has to be circumspect around bullies and his older brother, Erik, who seems to have dissoluteness living inside of him. Throughout the novel, the author Edward Bloor uses literary devices such as similes to make the readers visualize the descriptive situations in the story. These similes describe to the reader how different occurrences relate to other actions, objects, or living things.

Then the brown water that had puddled all over the field began to move. It began to run toward the back portables, like someone had pulled the plug out of a giant bathtub…. The boards began to come apart, and the loose mud under the walkways began to slide toward that giant bathtub drain”(Bloor 80).
This passage is significant because Bloor’s use of these similes gives the reader a visual understanding about what the novel-scene looks and sounds like. After reading this passage, the reader is informed of the scary, ‘out of the blue’ situation which includes the protagonist, Paul Fisher. The sinkhole incident that is described by similes, affects how Paul sees his town, Tangerine; and not in a beneficial