Use Of Figurative Language In Eudora Welty's Essay

Have you ever been through an experience that impacted you so much it left you speechless and verbose at the same time? Have you been through an experience so memorable that you exaggerate the experience when you try to recall it? If your answer to the following questions are a definite yes, then you have a lot in common with author Eudora Welty. Welty has been through a lot of significant events in her childhood that she still recognizes to this day. In a passage from her autobiography “One Writer’s Beginnings,” Eudora Welty uses descriptive and figurative language such as pathos, to convey the intensity and value of her experiences as a young girl. In the beginning of the passage, Welty elaborates on her experiences as a child going to the library by describing the actions of her librarian Ms. Calloway. She uses phrases such as “her dragon eye on the front door,” to describe Ms. Calloway’s attentiveness to each and every person walking into the library. She continues by stating the standards the librarian had towards specifically the girls that walked into her library. “If she could see through your skirt, she

She conveys this by recalling a memory of her mother multitasking while reading. She states, “I remember Mother reading the new issue of Time magazine while taking the part of the Wolf in a game of “Little Red Riding Hood” with the children.” Welty thoroughly described this to help the audience see the connection for her love and hunger for reading to her mother’s love for reading to the point where she is skilled at multitasking but at the same time not neglecting other responsibilities such as taking care of the children. With this description, the readers can see how attentive she was towards both activities because not only was she reading an interesting magazine but played an actual character in the game with the children as