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Hyperbole
Explanation and Analysis—The Lightless Womb:
While discussing her own difficult childhood, Rosa uses an extended metaphor that imagines her adolescent years as a protracted state of being in the womb of her mother:
I was fourteen then, fourteen in years if they could have been called years while in that unpaced corridor which I called childhood, which was not living but rather some projection of the lightless womb itself; I gestate and complete, not aged, just overdue because of some caesarean lack, some cold head-nuzzling forceps of the savage time which should have torn me free, I waited not for light but for that doom which we call female victory which is: endure and then endure, without rhyme or reason or hope of reward—and then endure; I like that blind subterranean fish [...]
Here, Rosa informs Quentin that she did not have a conventional childhood. Because of the early deaths of her parents and her isolation from other members of her family, Rosa feels that she did not experience a typical adolescence but rather a "projection of the lightless womb itself." Here, she uses clear hyperbole, exaggerating her own sense that she missed out on childhood and suggesting that she spent those years in the womb rather than developing from childhood to adulthood. Through this metaphor of prolonged gestation, Rosa underscores her sense of herself as having missed out on key stages of adolescent development due to factors outside of her own control.
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